Preamble

The House met at half-past Two o'clock

PRAYERS

[Mr. SPEAKER in the Chair]

PRIVATE BUSINESS

CROYDON CORPORATION BILL (By Order)

Third Reading deferred till Thursday

Oral Answers to Questions — SCOTLAND

Guided Missiles Range, Western Isles

Mr. Malcolm MacMillan: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland whether he is aware of the demand for a public local inquiry into the proposal to establish a guided missiles range in the Western Isles; and when he intends to arrange for the inquiry.

Mr. de Freitas: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland whether he will hold a public inquiry in South Uist into the proposed Royal Air Force rocket range.

The Joint Under-Secretary of State for Scotland (Mr. J. Nixon Browne): As already stated, Her Majesty's Government, before deciding in November last that the range should go ahead, did everything possible to consult the public bodies concerned and also individual crofters, and to explain to them what exactly was involved. In view of the absence of objections after detailed plans had been circulated, no need was seen for a public inquiry. Applications for authority for the resumption of crofting land for the range are now before the Land Court which will, it is understood, hold a hearing in Benbecula on 8th April.

Mr. MacMillan: Is the Minister aware that provision is made under the 1947 White Paper for responsible persons to ask for an inquiry, quite apart from the local authorities; that 168 hon. Members have signed a Motion which is on the

Order Paper asking for such an inquiry; that a meeting of local, representative people has also asked for it, and that nobody has objected to its being held? In the circumstances, even from the Government's own point of view, does not the Minister think that it might be worth while to have an inquiry?

Mr. Browne: While there was no stated time limit, my right hon. Friend did wait from June to November before taking the action he did. He considers, and I am sure the House will consider, that he waited a reasonable time. With that point in view, my right hon. Friend did not feel that a Motion signed by 168 Members would constitute an objection of substance within the time limit.

Hon. Members: Oh.

Mr. MacMillan: Is the Minister suggesting that nearly 170 signatures of hon. Members of this House, of at least two of the parties. does not constitute pressure from a body of responsible persons? That is really what the hon. Gentleman is saying. Is he aware that local people, and many others who have had some opportunity of considering this matter, did not at first realise the impact and meaning of it until very recently and until fuller facts were disclosed? There is still a strong suspicion that the full facts are not known. Does not the hon. Gentleman consider that, from the Government's own point of view, it would be well to have an inquiry and to allow people to know the full facts as soon as possible?

Mr. Browne: I was answering the Question which the hon. Gentleman put to me. In regard to the other point, I do not think it would be wise for me to add to the reply I have given, as the matter is before the Land Court.

Mr. Rankin: If the Minister is convinced that the Government have a good case, why will they not submit it to a public inquiry?

Mr. Browne: I have made no pronouncement on that point at all. I have said that the matter is before the Land Court, and I do not think that I should add to what I have already said.

Mr. MacMillan: In view of the unsatisfactory nature of the reply, I beg to give notice that I shall raise the matter at the earliest possible moment.

Resident Dentist, Western Isles

Mr. Malcolm MacMillan: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland whether he is aware that people in the islands of Barra, Benbecula, North and South Uist, requiring dental treatment, have not been provided for under the National Health Service owing to the lack of a resident dentist for over a year, have to travel to and from the mainland at their own expense, and pay board and lodgings while absent from home and work; and what steps are being taken to provide local dental treatment.

Mr. J. N. Browne: My right hon. Friend is aware that these areas are at present without a resident dentist. The county council and the executive council are continuing their joint efforts to replace the dentist who left early in 1956. To attract applicants, my right hon. Friend has authorised the executive council to guarantee a minimum annual income and the county council will provide the tenancy of a house and the use of a fully equipped mobile dental unit. He is writing to the hon. Member about the temporary arrangements which have been made to minimise the need for patients to travel for dental treatment.

Mr. MacMillan: Can the Minister indicate what the financial incentive is? On the last occasion it was obviously not sufficient to keep the man we had.

Mr. Browne: The financial incentive is a starting salary of £1,250 instead of £1.000. I think the hon. Gentleman will agree that it would not be right or in the patients' interests to obtain dentists by financial inducements alone.

Mr. MacMillan: Is the Minister aware that the financial welfare of the patients is far from being looked after, when they are having to do without dental treatment or pay their fares to Oban, Glasgow and Inverness, and then pay for board and lodging while having dental treatment which it is the statutory duty of the Minister to supply?

Mr. Browne: Everything possible is being done. The hon. Gentleman's Question will have helped to give publicity to the post. Under the arrangements now made this is quite an attractive post for anybody who likes living in the Islands.

Mr. Thornton-Kemsley: Is it not certain that there will be a great extension in the health and community services in the Islands if the proposals for a guided missiles range materialise?

Mr. Browne: Any dentist interested in the post will no doubt bear that point in mind.

Crofters' Houses (Deposits)

Mr. Malcolm MacMillan: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland whether he is aware that some crofters are being required to deposit about £300 before being allowed to build new houses with grant and loan aid from his Department; that this is discouraging some of those most in need of new homes; and whether he will reduce by half the amount required to be deposited.

The Joint Under-Secretary of State for Scotland (Lord John Hope): Each application is dealt with on its merits, and my right hon. Friend regrets that he cannot lay down any general rule in this matter. I can, however, assure the hon. Member that no unnecessary difficulties are placed in the way of the crofters.

Mr. MacMillan: Is the Minister aware that it is an unnecessary difficulty to place in a man's way if he cannot afford to produce £300 for the deposit and is therefore unable to build his house, which everyone wants him to build? It is a question of the replacement of houses which are no longer fit for habitation. Is the Minister aware that a man can get 90 per cent. of the deposit from a private building society? In those circumstances, why does his Department hold out for £300 in the case of a house which probably costs about £1,000 to £1,700?

Lord John Hope: It is seldom that as much as £300 is asked, although it sometimes is. There is no evidence that this practice of asking for a deposit, which was forced upon the Department by experience, has, in fact, discouraged crofters from seeking these facilities.

Scientific Education

Mr. Fletcher: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland what steps he is taking to improve the facilities in Scottish schools for scientific education.

The Joint Under-Secretary of State for Scotland (Mr. Niall Macpherson): Much has already been done to improve facilities. Provision is being made in the 1957–58 and 1958–59 building programmes for the improvement of substandard laboratories.

Mr. Fletcher: Is the hon. Member aware that a great many non-Scottish Members are very conscious of the great contributions made by Scotland to education in the past and are hoping that Scotland will make a major contribution towards meeting the challenge that lies before us, of vastly increasing our numbers of scientists and technologists in the near future?

Mr. Macpherson: I am grateful to the hon. Member for his tribute to Scotland's past contribution. I can assure him that it will be our endeavour to maintain that contribution in future, particularly upon the scientific and technological side.

Hospitals (Cloistering-Emolument System)

Mr. Rankin: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland if he will inquire into the prevalence of the cloistering-emolument system of service which exists in State hospitals in Scotland today, and indicate what steps he proposes to take to bring about its termination.

Mr. J. N. Browne: My right hon. Friend assumes that the hon. Member is referring to the fact that some doctors are required to live in hospital premises where it is necessary that doctors should always be available. He has no evidence of dissatisfaction with this practice.

Mr. Rankin: I assumed that the Minister had evidence that it existed so widely amongst the institutional section of the staff that when they became organised in trade unions it was promptly stopped, and now remains only amongst the medical section. Does he agree with the principle that employers have the right to claim emoluments from cloistered staff who are cloistered for the purpose of carrying out their duties?

Mr. Browne: That is really a different question. No responsible group in the hospital service has objected to the present practice. I shall be glad to look into any case which the hon. Member has in mind.

Mr. Rankin: On a point of order. If the hon. Member reads the Scotsman of 22nd February——

Mr. Speaker: Order. That is not a point of order.

Justices of the Peace, Lanarkshire

Mr. Timmons: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland if he will consider taking steps to change the machinery for the appointing of justices of the peace for Lanarkshire.

Mr. N. Macpherson: My right hon. Friend is not aware of any reason for such a change.

Mr. Timmons: Will the hon. Member again consult his right hon. Friend in this matter? There is a great deal of dissatisfaction in Lanarkshire about the method of selecting justices of the peace. Is he further aware that advisory committees are made up of members of two political parties? Irrespective of a person's character and integrity, if he has no political associations there is absolutely no hope of his getting on to a justices of the peace list. Will the Minister have another look at the matter and again consult his right hon. Friend?

Mr. Macpherson: I shall be glad to ask my right hon. Friend to look at the matter again, but I can assure the hon. Member that it is not the case that the justices of the peace lately appointed came from only two political parties. The political opinions of some of them were unknown.

Mr. Lawson: Is the Minister aware that districts of very considerable size in Lanarkshire appear to be without justices of the peace? Will he see that those districts have their needs met in that connection?

Mr. Macpherson: This is a matter for the appropriate advisory committee, and I shall be glad to refer the matter to it.

Mr. Timmons: On a point of order. In view of that most unsatisfactory Answer, I beg to give notice that I shall raise this question on the Adjournment at the earliest opportunity.

Fishing Boats (Grants)

Sir W. Anstruther-Gray: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland whether he is aware that shore owners can obtain a grant for a new engine for a new boat but not for a new engine for an old boat although working owners can obtain a grant for both new and old boats; and whether he will reconsider this anomalous situation.

Lord John Hope: My right hon. Friend is aware of the distinction referred to. The position was carefully reviewed before the introduction of the White Fish and Herring Industries Bill, passed by this House last week, but the conclusion was reached that there was no evidence that the absence of re-engining grants for shore owners seriously interfered with fishing operations.

Sir W. Anstruther-Gray: In view of the fact that it is desirable to have the maximum number of boats reconditioned, is it not a pity that the withholding of this grant should interfere with a single case of an old boat requiring to be reconditioned with a new engine?

Lord John Hope: I do not think one can assume that there has been such interference. This distinction is not a new one, as my hon. and gallant Friend knows. It maintains one which has been already decided upon, and I think that it is probably wise to retain it.

Mr. Hector Hughes: Is the Minister aware that this is only one of many outstanding problems which have not been dealt with by the Government in recent legislation relating to the fishing industry? Will he consult the industry with a view to having those problems efficiently dealt with in a comprehensive Bill?

Lord John Hope: The whole point is that the problem has been dealt with, and that is exactly why my hon. and gallant Friend put down the Question.

Mr. Duthie: Will my hon. Friend accept the assurance that this is a major problem in the fishing industry? Will he undertake to look at the matter again, together with the respective fishermen's associations, which. I can assure him, feel very strongly in this matter?

Lord John Hope: The strong feeling has been known. It was in view of that

and all the other circumstances that this decision was taken, although it was bound not to be universally popular.

Coal Industry, Glenrothes (Housing)

Mr. Hamilton: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland whether he will make a statement concerning the further housing requirements of the National Coal Board in Glenrothes.

Mr. J. N. Browne: The current estimate of requirements as communicated by the Board to my Department is that 850 houses will be required during the four years from 1957 to 1960. The Board has also indicated that, subject to later review, a further 1,500 to 2,000 houses will be required in the five years from 1961 to 1965.

Mr. Hamilton: In view of the accelerated demand for housing by the National Coal Board, does not the hon. Gentleman think it incumbent upon the Department to undertake urgent talks with the President of the Board of Trade with a view to the introduction of new light industries into the town? If it is not planned now, the stage will be reached when miners will simply not come in because there is no employment for their wives and families.

Mr. Browne: I can assure the hon. Member that my right hon. Friend is in consultation with the Board of Trade upon this very important matter.

Derating

Mr. Hamilton: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland what was the annual value of the derating concession allowed in Scotland to industry and agriculture, respectively, in each of the last eight years.

Mr. J. N. Browne: As the Answer is long and contains figures, I will, with permission, circulate it in the OFFICIAL REPORT.

Mr. Hamilton: Can the hon. Member indicate whether it will be possible to give figures for separate industries in this connection? Would not he consider it right and proper, in view of the current financial difficulties of local authorities—and would it not be a measure of justice—that industry should be asked to pay its full rates?

Mr. Browne: Upon the first point, I should not like to commit myself without notice. The second point is another question.

Mr. Willis: It is a very important point.

Following is the answer:

It is estimated that had there been no derating of either industrial and freight transport or agricultural subjects under the Local Government (Scotland) Act, 1929, those subjects would have paid additional rates of the approximate amounts shown below:




Amount


Year
Industrial and Freight Transport Subjects
Agricultural Subjects




£m.
£m.


1949–50
…
2· 8
1· 1


1950–51
…
2· 9
1· 2


1951–52
…
3· 5
1· 4


1952–53
…
4· 2
1· 6


1953–54
…
4· 6
1· 7


1954–55
…
4· 6
1· 7


1955–56
…
5· 1
1· 9


1956–57
…
5· 9
2· 1

Land Acquisition, West Kilbride (Public inquiry)

Mr. Emrys Hughes: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland what was the purpose of the recent inquiry relating to the acquisition of land near West Kilbride; and what opportunity was given to objectors to state their case.

Mr. N. Macpherson: I assume that the hon. Member is referring to the public inquiry held at Largs into the application by the South of Scotland Electricity Board for my right hon. Friend's consent to the erection of a nuclear power station at Hunterston. Notice was given in the Press and otherwise that objections could be sent to him, and objectors were given the opportunity to state their case at the public inquiry.

Mr. Hughes: Does not the Minister agree that there is an extraordinary contrast between the way in which the wealthy property owners of West Kilbride were treated and the way in which the crofters of South Uist were treated? Will he state why this inquiry was advertised in the local Press for the benefit of the Tory proprietors of West Kilbride, whereas no opportunity was given

in the local Press to the crofters to state their case?

Mr. Macpherson: Since the hon. Member for Western Isles (Mr. Malcolm MacMillan) has given notice that this matter is to be raised on the Adjournment, I am not certain that it would be appropriate for me to deal with the second part of the question.

Housing (Tenders)

Mrs. Mann: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland for how many houses tenders have been accepted since August, 1956; and how many of these have been completed.

Mr. J. N. Browne: Since 1st August, 1956, my right hon. Friend has approved tenders for 13,856 houses, of which 3,462 were covered by proposals received before, and 10,394 by proposals received on or after that date. Six houses in the latter group have been completed.

Mrs. Mann: If there are six or 600 will they be subject to the reduction in the subsidy provided for in a Bill which has not yet become an Act?

Mr. Browne: No, Sir.

Mr. Ross: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland if he will state the number of new houses for which tenders were approved in February last; and if he will give the same information for February, 1956 and 1955.

Mr. J. N. Browne: In February, 1957, my right hon. Friend approved tenders for 2,947 houses. The corresponding figures for February, 1956, and February, 1955, are 2,414 and 998, respectively.

Home Safety (Grants)

Mrs. Mann: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland how many local authorities are getting direct grants for home safety work in Scotland.

Mr. J. N. Browne: Expenditure by local health authorities on home safety work attracts National Health Service grant at the rate of 50 per cent. This grant is payable to all of the 55 local health authorities.

Mrs. Mann: Is the hon. Gentleman aware that there are only four home safety committees in Scotland? Are not the committees of the 55 authorities to


which he referred accident prevention committees, which are mainly concerned with road accident prevention?

Mr. Browne: No specific grant is payable for home safety work as such, but normal advice and help is given by health visitors and other domiciliary services, and that automatically ranks for grant. Apart from that, my right hon. Friend has in the past approved for grant special expenditure on such items as special propaganda and provision of fire guards. I think that if the local authority concerned applied to my right hon. Friend he would look sympathetically at any proposition put forward.

Captain Duncan: Will my hon. Friend say under which Section of which Act grants are available so that local authorities, if they wish to have home safety weeks propaganda, or other functions to promote home safety, can know under what Act they can receive grants?

Mr. Browne: Under the National Health Service Act.

Mrs. Mann: On a point of order. Owing to the unsatisfactory nature of the reply, I beg to give notice that I shall raise this matter again on the Adjournment.

Slum Clearance, Leith

Mr. Hoy: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland what provision is made in the new development plan for Edinburgh for dealing with slum clearance and the provision of new houses in Leith.

Mr. J. N. Browne: The plan allocates a total area of about 11 acres for new housing in Leith. In addition, the corporation is now preparing detailed proposals for comprehensive development areas for the Kirkgate and Citadel districts, and proposes to build houses on the site of Leith Fort.

Mr. Hoy: Is the hon. Gentleman aware that there has been a continuous decline in the population of Leith in the last few years, which is due entirely to the very bad housing conditions, and that the slow rate of progress in the building of new houses is making conditions much more difficult? Will he take steps to expedite slum clearance and building, in this ancient burgh?

Mr. Browne: I agree with the hon. Member that slum clearance was held up, but, now that we have the sites in Leith, I think the position will be better, although no specific proposals for redevelopment have been submitted for Leith.

Mr. Hoy: Will the hon. Gentleman take steps with the corporation to expedite house building on the sites it has got? It certainly has a particularly good site at Leith Fort. I do not know that any excuse could be made for delay, because the site has already been turned over to the corporation.

Local Authorities (Block Grants)

Mr. G. M. Thomson: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland if he will publish as a White Paper a summary of his discussions with the local authorities on the new method of calculating block grants before he announces the decisions of Her Majesty's Government on this subject.

Mr. J. N. Browne: It is the intention to present a White Paper as soon as the discussions with the local authority associations have been concluded. My right hon. Friend hopes that this will be before the Summer Recess.

School Building Programme

Mr. G. M. Thomson: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland how many projects which were included, respectively, in the 1955-56 and 1956-57 school building programme have not yet been started; and if he will list the local authorities concerned and the value of the projects.

Mr. N. Macpherson: All the projects which my right hon. Friend expected to start in 1955–56 have now started. Until returns are received from education authorities after 31st March my right hon. Friend cannot say how many of the projects expected to start in 1956–57 will not have started.

Mr. Thomson: Can the Minister tell me quite definitely that the figure of £13·2 million which his hon. Friend gave me last week as the figure for the Scottish school building programme for 1957–58 does not include any of the projects included in the previous school building programmes, but not yet started?

Mr. Macpherson: I should need notice of that question.

Mr. D. Johnston: Has the hon. Gentleman noted that Edinburgh Corporation has postponed the building of a secondary school in Edinburgh during the relevant years because of its inability to raise the necessary capital sum of £ 10 million?

Mr. Macpherson: No, Sir, the reason for that has not been drawn to my attention, but I can tell the hon. and learned Member that the principal reason for delay is the continued shortage of architects and quantity surveyors.

Secondary Schools (Teachers)

Mr. Hannan: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland, in view of the fact that at the beginning of the school term this year there will be a substantial increase in the number of pupils entering secondary schools, and that in the following years this number will increase further, and since there is a diminishing number of secondary school teachers, what steps he proposes to take to overcome this problem.

Mr. N. Macpherson: The intake of pupils into secondary schools will probably be less this year than in 1956 although it will increase in 1958 and 1959. The number of secondary school teachers is increasing steadily, but not fast enough to meet the growing demand. The Advisory Council is considering the problem and my right hon. Friend hopes to receive a report from them in the early summer.

Mr. Hannan: Does not that reply confirm the fears expressed in the Question? Is the hon. Gentleman aware that the City of Glasgow even now requires 500 teachers and that action should have been taken at least three or four years ago by the Government——

Sir T. Moore: Ten years ago.

Mr. Hannan: —to avoid the emergency which is now upon us? Will the hon. Gentleman ask his right hon. Friend to do one of three things? Will he seek the release of teachers from the Forces, or approach industry for the release of qualified men, or enter into arrangements for primary teachers to go into senior school work?

Mr. Macpherson: My right hon. Friend has set as the first task of the Advisory Council to consider measures to meet the increasing demand for teachers for secondary education. As I say, we hope to have its report early in the summer.

Miss Herbison: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland what is the extent of the shortage of teachers with the requisite qualifications and training in junior secondary and senior secondary schools in Scotland; and which areas have the greatest shortage.

Mr. N. Macpherson: Separate figures for different types of secondary schools are not available. In October, 1956, education authorities estimated that they required 1,129 additional teachers qualified to teach in secondary schools. According to the authorities' own estimates the shortage of these teachers was proportionately most severe in Ross and Cromarty, Stirlingshire, Banffshire, Aberdeenshire, Renfrewshire and West Lothian.

Miss Herbison: Is the Minister aware that his Answers to Questions Nos. 22, 23 and 24 and to previous Questions must cause great concern to all those interested in education? Will he not give some further consideration to matters which might attract a greater number of teachers? In particular, will he give the greatest consideration to the introduction of a proper pensions scheme for widows and dependants, since that might do something to attract the number of people we need in this profession?

Mr. Macpherson: The hon. Lady knows that all these matters are under consideration at the present time.

Emigrants

Mr. Lawson: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland what was the total number of Scottish emigrants during each of the past three years.

Mr. N. Macpherson: It is estimated that the net migration from Scotland in the year ending on 30th June, 1956, which is the latest period for which figures are available, was 24,710. The figures for the years ending on 30th June, 1954, and 30th June, 1955, were 25,398


and 23,150 respectively. These totals include a net migration to other parts of the United Kingdom of about 13,000.

Mr. Lawson: Is the Joint Under-Secretary aware that I am asking for the gross figure, not the net figure? Is he also aware that a person going into Scotland is not necessarily equivalent to a person coming out of Scotland? Unless we are going to be guessing as to what is actually happening, it is high time we got the gross figures of the total number of Scottish-born people leaving Scotland. Will the hon. Gentleman try to get those figures for us?

Mr. Macpherson: Yes, I shall see if they can be obtained.

Women's Hospitals, Edinburgh

Mr. Lawson: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland what representations he has received urging the preservation of the character of the Bruntsfield Hospital for Women and Children and the Elsie Inglis Memorial Maternity Hospital, Edinburgh, as institutions where women and children may be cared for by legally qualified medical women.

Mr. J. N. Browne: Representations have been received from hon. Members, from the board of management concerned, from a number of bodies, mainly societies representing women, and from a large number of private persons.

Mr. Lawson: Is the Joint Under-Secretary aware that hon. Members on this side of the House—and, I presume, hon. Members opposite—are receiving representations on this question by every post? Although my constituency is some distance away, I have received at least twenty communications from constituents concerned with this question. Is not one of the jobs of the Secretary of State to protect the users of hospitals from unnecessary bureaucracy? Is not that what is happening? Are we not being treated with unnecessary bureaucracy?

Mr. Browne: We had an Adjournment debate about this last night. I can once more assure the hon. Member that my right hon. Friend, in refraining from intervention, has taken all relevant factors into account.

Fishing Industry (Fuel Oil Costs)

Mr. Hoy: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland what representations he has received from the Scottish fishing industry regarding the proposed increase in the cost of fuel oil; if he is aware that this will result in the laying up of a considerable number of vessels, with consequent unemployment; and what action he proposes to take.

Lord John Hope: The Scottish and English Trawler Owners and the Scottish Inshore Fishermen asked for increased subsidy when the price of oil rose in January. My right hon. Friends the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and the Secretary of State have told them that we shall take account of oil costs and other relevant factors in considering the subsidy rates to apply after 1st August next. In the meantime, my right hon. Friend is not aware that any Scottish ships have been laid up, or are to be laid up.

Mr. Hoy: Is the Minister not aware that the Scottish fishing industry, in common with the fishing industry of the rest of Britain, has just received another notice saying that there is to be a further increase in the price of these oils and for the Scottish fishing industry the extra cost will be £¼ million a year? Has he nothing to say to the industry with a view to giving it some assistance to carry it over this extremely difficult period for which it cannot be held responsible?

Lord John Hope: The answer to that is contained in my substantive reply.

School Classes (Size)

Miss Herbison: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland how many classes are above the number laid down in the code in primary, junior secondary and senior secondary schools in Scotland.

Mr. N. Macpherson: The latest available figures of oversize classes in the whole of Scotland relate to January, 1956. At that date there were 1,286 oversize classes in primary departments, 725 in the first three years of secondary departments and 83 in the fourth and subsequent years.

Miss Herbison: Does the Minister tell us that the latest figures are for January, 1956? Since this is a most serious matter,


surely the Secretary of State ought to see that figures much more relevant than those of over a year ago are provided for hon. Members on both sides of the House.

Mr. N. Macpherson: It is difficult to get in figures from all parts of the country, but I take note of what the hon. Lady said.

Miss Herbison: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland how many classes are above the number laid down in the code in Lanarkshire and Glasgow, giving separate figures for primary, junior secondary and senior secondary schools.

Mr. N. Macpherson: The latest available figures of oversize classes in primary departments, in the first three years of secondary departments and in the fourth and subsequent years of secondary departments relate to the middle of January, 1957, for Lanarkshire and to the beginning of session 1956–57 for Glasgow. The figures for Lanarkshire are 266, 159 and six and for Glasgow, 415, 146 and thirty-eight.

Miss Herbison: Since the Minister is able to give later figures for these two places, it seems to me that he could have obtained later figures in answer to Question No. 22. Do not these figures suggest that steps should be taken by the Secretary of State to ensure that these numbers are decreased?

Mr. Macpherson: As I have said, we have asked the Advisory Council to advise on the secondary side of the problem. We are taking all possible steps to reduce the number of oversize classes.

Overspill, Glasgow

Mr. Ross: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland which local authorities have declared their willingness to consider accommodating overspill population from Glasgow; and what numbers have been mentioned in each case.

Mr. J. N. Browne: Authorities which have indicated an interest in catering for Glasgow overspill include the Town Councils of Kilmarnock, Kirkintilloch and Milngavie, and the County Council of Dunbarton. The authorities have, of course, not committed themselves as to numbers or detailed proposals, pending the legislative decisions of Parliament and

discussions with Glasgow Corporation which the corporation has already initiated.

Mr. Ross: Indicating "an interest" does not mean that in any way they are committed to carrying out any such arrangements as envisaged under the overspill agreement. Has any authority in Scotland shown more than interest and given a definite promise that it will carry out such an agreement?

Mr. Browne: I think I have indicated in my reply exactly what the position is.

Mr. Rankin: Is the decision of these authorities to consider accommodating overspill from Glasgow linked with the provision of industry in the receiving areas?

Mr. Browne: That is all covered in the Bill now before the Committee.

Oral Answers to Questions — MINISTRY OF WORKS

Stonehenge

Mr. Parker: asked the Minister of Works what recent action has been taken to re-erect fallen stones at Stonehenge.

The Minister of Works (Mr. Hugh Molson): Preparatory studies and arrangements are in progress, and I hope the trilithon and two Outer Circle stones will be re-erected next year.

Mr. Speaker: Question No. 28.

Mr. Nicholson: Is not an hon. Member permitted to ask a supplementary question on this important matter?

Mr. Speaker: I did not see the hon. Member rise, but he may ask his supplementary question.

Mr. Nicholson: Is my right hon. Friend aware that there is a school of archaeological thought which is most suspicious of what the Minister is proposing? Will he look into the matter again?

Mr. Molson: There is profound suspicion amongst all archaeologists about what all other archaeologists say or do.

Employment Exchange, Accrington

Mr. H. Hynd: asked the Minister of Works when the new employment exchange for Accrington will be built.

Mr. Molson: A new employment exchange at Accrington is included amongst those to be built in the future, but it cannot be undertaken for some years.

Mr. Hynd: Is the Minister aware that this is a serious matter, that this exchange is very badly situated, inside an arcade, and that the buildings and rooms reflect no credit on his Department?

Mr. Molson: I know that the present premises are unsatisfactory. My Department has acquired another site which will be used for the new exchange to replace the present exchange.

Mr. Osborne: Is there any use for an employment exchange there, since there is no unemployment in Accrington?

St. Vigeans Church, Arbroath

Captain Duncan: asked the Minister of Works whether he is in a position to make a statement about the future preservation of the pre-Norman sculptured stones at St. Vigeans Church, Arbroath.

Mr. Molson: Yes, Sir. I have agreed to the request of the Kirk Session to assume the guardianship of these stones and I welcome this opportunity of paying tribute to the generosity of the Kirk Treasurer, Mr. G. W. Dunn, in presenting free of consideration a cottage in which the Stones can be suitably housed and displayed.

Captain Duncan: While thanking my right hon. Friend for that reply, may I ask him whether he will add to the pleasure of all archaeologists—all archaeologists, whether they quarrel or not—by producing, when the cottage is erected, pamphlets or illustrated booklets at a price of not more than 2s., which tourists can buy, in order that the true history of these stones may be revealed? May I ask my right hon. Friend whether he is aware that the first documentary reference to this church is by a Bishop Hugh?

Mr. Molson: I was not aware of the interesting historical fact which my hon. and gallant Friend has conveyed to me. I will consider the possibility of producing something on the lines he suggests.

Ancient Monuments

Mr. E. Fletcher: asked the Minister of Works what steps his Department takes to make known the ancient monuments under his care to visitors to this country from overseas.

Mr. Molson: Ancient monuments figure in much of the publicity directed towards tourists. Leaflets and posters about ancient monuments are distributed through the British Travel and Holidays Association and by travel agencies and shipping and air transport companies. Photographs and particulars of many monuments are widely used abroad by the British Travel and Holidays Association and by travel agencies.

Mr. Fletcher: Does that reply mean that the Minister is aware that if these monuments are adequately publicised there is a very good opportunity of increasing the dollar revenue of this country because of the interest which foreign visitors take in these subjects?

Mr. Molson: Undoubtedly our very interesting past is one of the attractions of these islands, and we try to bring it to the attention of people who are considering visiting us. At the same time, I am bound to say that ancient monuments, although a tourist attraction, are not in themselves a great source of income from tourists.

Mr. Anthony Greenwood: Is the Minister aware that although the material contained in these leaflets prepared by the Inspector of Ancient Monuments is admirable, there is, nevertheless, a feeling that the way in which it is presented could be greatly improved. Would he consider discussing with the Central Office of Information and the Stationery Office possible methods of improving the publications which are issued?

Mr. Molson: I know that a large number of our publications arc of a somewhat scholarly flavour, but we do all we can to encourage the British Travel and Holidays Association, which is less scholarly in its outlook, to give a more popular presentation of our monuments.

Mr. Nicholson: Will my right hon. Friend do his best to avoid the dangers of over-restoration? If he is to put everything back to where it was before, he will find himself in an awful mess.

Mr. Molson: I think that was a supplementary question to Question No. 27 and not to the Question which I am answering.

Brick-making Experiments (Fly-ash)

Mr. Dodds: asked the Minister of Works what conclusions have been reached regarding the technical and economic problems raised by the large-scale application of the results of the experiments at the Building Research Station, Garston, Hertfordshire, in making bricks from a mixture of fly-ash from power stations and clay; and what quantity of bricks was produced by this method in 1956.

Mr. Molson: The application to large-scale production of the techniques referred to is a matter for individual firms, of whom there are some 700 engaged in brick production, and I have no information on the matter. The economic value of fly-ash depends on the proximity of a brick works with a supply of suitable clay to a power station producing suitable ash. I understand from the Central Electricity Authority that in 1956 some 25,000 tons of ash was so used, and the amount appears to be increasing.

Mr. Dodds: Is it not a fact that suitable ash and suitable clay have been brought together in Leicester and Glasgow? As it is desirable to make use of this waste material, is not the right hon. Gentleman's Department, or some other Department, trying to encourage some suitable firms to use this suitable fly-ash?

Mr. Molson: In view of the information that the hon. Member appears to have on the subject, it hardly seems necessary for him to ask me the Question.

Oral Answers to Questions — BRITISH ARMY

War Office (Senior Officers)

Mr. E. Johnson: asked the Secretary of State for War how the number of generals, lieutenant-generals and major-generals, respectively, now employed at the War Office compares with the number of those ranks employed there on 1st March, 1939.

The Secretary of State for War (Mr. John Hare): Two generals, seven lieutenant-generals and nineteen major-generals on 1st March. 1939, compared

with three generals, five lieutenant-generals and thirty-two major-generals at present.

Mr. E. Johnson: Can my right hon. Friend explain the reason for that increase? Even if it is merely that there are far too many generals on the Active List, are there no bowler hats amongst those surplus stores of which we read?

Mr. Hare: In reply to the first part of my hon. Friend's supplementary, the Army, of course, is now almost double its 1939 size. As to the second part of his supplementary, I have already given the House, the right hon. Member for Easington (Mr. Shinwell) and others an assurance that I have every intention of getting down these appointments to the minimum necessary.

Mr. Shinwell: Now that the right hon. Gentleman has admitted that the War Office is cluttered up with a super abundance of generals, what does he intend to do about it? He has given the House an assurance that he intends to do something about it, but how long will it take? Is he going to jettison some of these unwanted generals?

Mr. Hare: The right hon. Gentleman gets very hot and cold over this. There is one general more than in his day. I have every intention of doing what I can to reduce the number.

Warcop Hall, Westmorland (Purchase)

Mr. Short: asked the Secretary of State for War on what date the purchase of Warcop Hall, Westmorland, was completed; what was the purchase price; for what purpose it has been used since it was purchased; and what are the future intentions of his Department as to its use.

The Under-Secretary of State for War (Mr. Julian Amery): The purchase of the Warcop Hall estate was completed on 1st June, 1955. It would be contrary to Government practice to disclose the price paid. The estate was needed as part of a firing range.

Mr. Short: How much longer does the Under-Secretary of State intend to keep on repeating this silly reply? This House is in the middle of a large and populous village. How on earth can he say that it is part of a range? Will the Minister


say to what use the hall is being put, and why was it necessary for his Department to purchase this manor house, which is one of the most beautiful manor houses in this part of the country? Why does not the War Office either sell it or find a tenant for it? And why all the secrecy about the purchase price? Can the hon. Gentleman imagine what some of his hon. Friends would say if the Coal Board or the Central Electricity Authority had been concerned?

Mr. Amery: The hall was bought as part of a package deal, and arrangements have now been made to sell it to a private purchaser.

Medical Reports

Mr. E. Johnson: asked the Secretary of State for War what is the normal length of time for which the medical records of units are kept.

Mr. John Hare: Some unit medical reports are destroyed after three months, but personal medical records are kept for many years.

Mr. E. Johnson: Is my right hon. Friend aware that claims arising from illness or disability caused or aggravated by service in the Army are often very hard to support because of lack of adequate records? Could he get a little more uniformity into the system, and see that the records are kept rather longer than is the case at present?

Mr. Hare: I have great sympathy with what my hon. Friend says. If he has any particular case, perhaps he will bring it to my attention, but I can assure him that our aim is not to destroy medical records until we are sure that the individual's position in any pension claim will not be affected by destruction.

Don Barracks, Aberdeen (Soldiers' Families)

Mr. Hector Hughes: asked the Secretary of State for War what progress he has made towards finding accommodation for the wives and children of those married soldiers in Don Barracks, Aberdeen, for whose families there is no room in the barracks.

Mr. J. Amery: Five families have been accommodated since I answered a related Question by the hon. and learned Member on 19th February. The waiting list

at this barracks is, however, the same length as before, because further families have become eligible for quarters. I regret that progress cannot be more rapid because we have to accommodate extra families of the Gordon Highlanders Band at Bridge of Don until quarters become available for them at Dover, where the battalion is stationed. These families are due to move out by the end of next month when the waiting list for quarters will be much reduced.

Mr. Hector Hughes: While thanking the hon. Gentleman for the little bit of progress he has made, may I ask him if he realises that it is unworthy of a great Power like Britain to keep married soldiers separated from their wives and families for long periods, as in this instance, and will he take urgent steps to see that those families are reunited?

Mr. Amery: I will certainly bear the hon. and learned Member's point in mind.

Pay Offices, Edinburgh

Mr. Willis: asked the Secretary of State for War what progress has been made in the "civilianisation" of the two Army pay offices in Edinburgh.

Mr. J. Amery: These two pay offices have a total staff of about 250, of whom 68 are civilians and 41 members of the Women's Royal Army Corps. The future composition of pay offices is at present under review and will depend upon a number of considerations. As already stated by my right hon. Friend, it is our policy to replace soldiers by civilians wherever possible.

Mr. Mikardo: Is the hon. Gentleman aware that one does not civilianise an Army pay office by recruiting civilian clerks, instead of soldiers, to work under Army officers with no knowledge of modern accounting methods and machinery? Does he realise that he will have to civilianise the management and methods as well as the clerks if he wants to civilianise properly?

Mr. Amery: As my right hon. Friend made clear in the Vote on Account debate, it is our intention to introduce electronic computing methods as soon as possible.

Maryhill Barracks

Mr. Hannan: asked the Secretary of State for War if he is aware of the obsolete and out-moded accommodation for Service men at Maryhill Barracks; and if he will, in reviewing the Army's future needs, permit the resumption of building of new accommodation at Cardross.

Mr. J. Amery: A good deal of work has been done at different times to modernise Maryhill Barracks, but to proceed further with this programme now that we are uncertain how long we shall need the barracks would not be in the interest of public economy. As to Cardross, I regret that I cannot go beyond my Written Answer of 5th March to a similar Question by the hon. Member.

Mr. Hannan: Can the Under-Secretary say whether a decision in this matter is likely to be come to very soon?

Mr. Amery: I cannot say how soon it will be arrived at. It is not our intention to remain in the barracks indefinitely.

Mr. Strachey: But cannot the hon. Gentleman give us rather more hope of progress in this matter of barracks? After all, his colleague the Secretary of State for Air is now reported to he moving at more than supersonic speed. Cannot the hon. Gentleman at any rate move at some speed in this matter of barracks accommodation, which is, perhaps, the most important single factor in recruiting a voluntary Army?

Mr. Amery: I do not think that the Under-Secretary of State to the War Office should try to break through the sound barrier.

Mr. Ross: May I, as one with experience of Maryhill barracks, ask the Under-Secretary if it is not about time that they were designated as an ancient monument and handed over to the care of the Minister of Works?

Royal Norfolk Regiment

Sir F. Medlicott: asked the Secretary of State for War what representations have been made to him concerning the future of the Royal Norfolk Regiment; and if he will make a statement.

Mr. John Hare: I have received no representations about the future of this

regiment, nor am I aware of any through official channels.

Sir F. Medlicott: Is my right hon. Friend aware that, so far as it goes, that statement will give a great deal of reassurance in the county? Would he bear in mind that the Army could ill afford to be without this great regiment, which has served Britain with such efficiency, cheerfulness and courage in all parts of the world?

Mr. Hare: I hope that my hon. Friend does not misunderstand what I say. The question whether cuts will have to be applied to the infantry as a whole has not been decided. Therefore, the future of individual units cannot be considered at this stage.

Civilianisation

Mr. Peyton: asked the Secretary of State for War if he will issue an instruction to his Department that the word "civilianisation" be not used.

Mr. John Hare: If my hon. Friend or anybody else can suggest a shorter, more elegant single word to replace this ugly but time-saving term. I will gladly consider it.

Mr. Peyton: Surely, that will not do? May I ask my right hon. Friend when it was that he conceived this sudden respect for the single word, and does he not think that it would be altogether more fitting if he lent his support to a campaign for the dejargonisation of the language?

Mr. Hare: I would go even further. If my hon. Friend can suggest two words to replace this word, I will consider his suggestion.

Mr. Shinwell: When was the term "civilianisation" added to the vocabulary at the War Office? Was it in use in my time?

Mr. Hare: The right hon. Gentleman was not, I think, quite as progressive as we are in these days.

Major Legge-Bourke: Would my right hon. Friend bear in mind that it might be possible to use the word "civilising"?

Mr. Hare: I always listen very carefully to any suggestions made by my hon. and gallant Friend.

Mr. Emrys Hughes: Would the Minister consider substituting the word "liquidation"?

Mr. Hare: I do not think that would be a very helpful suggestion.

Surplus Razor Blades (Sale)

Mr. Dodds: asked the Secretary of State for War how many safety razor blades have been declared surplus by his Department since 1st January, 1955, and offered for sale at public auctions.

Mr. Hare: 8,595,100 razor blades have been declared surplus, of which 7,513,580 have already been sold at public auctions.

Mr. Dodds: Will the right hon. Gentleman answer two questions? First, were these razor blades offered to the other two Services, and. second, why were these razor blades, which were sold at the rate of eight a penny, not sold to the troops? Is it that the troops are not now using razor blades?

Mr. Hare: The answer to the first part of the hon. Gentleman's supplementary is that the disposal of surplus stores is the responsibility of my right hon. Friend the Minister of Supply. The second part of his supplementary is really another matter, and I notice that the hon. Gentleman has another Question down on the Order Paper for next Tuesday——

Mr. Dodds: Why not answer it now?

Mr. Hare: —and, therefore, I would hesitate to prejudge my answer next Tuesday.

Mr. H. Morrison: Can the Minister tell the House by what extraordinary and brilliant processes the War Office managed to accumulate 8 million-odd razor blades? How was it done?

Mr. Hare: The vast majority of these razor blades were accumulated because we were fighting a great war; in other words, they were largely accumulated during the time when the right hon. Gentleman was a member of the Coalition Government.

Forces, Cyprus (Medical Grades)

Mr. Gibson: asked the Secretary of State for War how many men of medical Grade II have been sent to Cyprus; and whether he will consider, during the present crisis in that island, not sending

men with less than 100 per cent. fitness to serve there.

Mr. J. Amery: Statistics showing the medical categories of men serving in Cyprus are not readily available, and the information requested by the hon. Member in the first part of his Question could not be provided without undue expenditure of effort. I would point out that many Grade II men are fit to perform suitable military duties in Cyprus, and I do not consider that it is either justifiable or practicable to limit service there to men of a higher standard of fitness.

Mr. Gibson: Does the Minister really suggest that a man, such as one of my constituents who has had only one eye all his life, out of which he can hardly see, is fit to be in the Army and, more than that, fit to be sent to Cyprus where, according to what my soldier friends tell me, a man needs four eyes in order to see what is happening all round him? Can it really be fair that a man of that physical capacity should be in the Army, let alone be sent to Cyprus, and will he look into the case if I send him the papers?

Mr. Amery: If the hon. Gentleman will send me the details of the case, I will certainly look into it. He will, of course, realise that there are clerical and other duties to be performed in Cyprus for which no high degree of fitness is relevant.

Forces, East Africa

Mr. Brockway: asked the Secretary of State for War if he will make a statement on the official proposals now being made to transfer control of the Armed Forces in East Africa from his Department to the East African Governments and what arrangements are proposed for servicing the Forces to the East Africa High Commission.

Mr. John Hare: It is proposed that control of the Armed Forces in Kenya. Tanganyika and Uganda should pass to the Governors of these territories on 1st July, thereby reverting to pre-war practice. The Governors will control the operational use of the Forces raised and stationed in their own territories, but the centralised military command for East Africa as a whole will be retained. As to the second part of the Question, detailed arrangements are still under discussion.

Mr. Brockway: Will the right hon. Gentleman very seriously consider the implications of this decision? Is he not aware that there has been the most vigorous opposition in the Legislature of Uganda, including that of the European representatives, and is it not undesirable that the control of the Armed Forces should be handed over to these Governments before democracy is established in these territories?

Mr. Hare: Those considerations are considerations which really ought to be addressed to my right hon. Friend the Colonial Secretary.

MEMBERS' SALARIES

Mr. Lewis: asked the Prime Minister what conditions are necessary before Her Majesty's Government will consider implementing the recommendations of the Select Committee on Members' Salaries; and whether, as the Government have agreed to implement the recommendations of the Select Committee on Members' Expenses, he will now state when he expects to take the necessary action to carry into effect these proposals.

The Secretary of State for the Home Department and Lord Privy Seal (Mr. R. A. Butler): I have been asked to reply.
My right hon. Friend has nothing to add to the reply which the hon. Gentleman received from his predecessor on 15th November.

Mr. Lewis: But that was not a reply at all. May I ask the Leader of the House whether he will ask the Prime Minister to try to deal with this matter as decently and generously as the right hon. Member for Woodford (Sir W. Churchill) tried to do when he was Prime Minister some five or six years ago, and not be afraid on this occasion of any revolt by the 1922 Committee?

Mr. Butler: I remember assisting my right hon. Friend the Member for Woodford (Sir W. Churchill) on the previous occasion, and I have no doubt that my successor as Chancellor of the Exchequer will help my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister on this occasion; but I cannot give any indication of what the date is likely to be.

COAL, GAS AND OIL (MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY)

Mr. A. Roberts: asked the Prime Minister in view of the complexities of our coal and atomic energy programme, involving more than £2,000 million, and of the expanding use of oil for industrial purposes, if he will appoint a Minister from the House of Commons to be responsible for coal, gas, and oil.

Mr. R. A. Butler: I have been asked to reply.
No, Sir. My right hon. Friend the Paymaster-General is the Minister answerable to this House for all matters within the responsibility of my noble Friend the Minister of Power.

Mr. Roberts: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that practically the whole economy of this country is in the hands of one Minister, and is he further aware that this sum of money of £2,000 million is voted from this House? Does not the right hon. Gentleman think that Members of this House should have the right to question a responsible Minister?

Mr. Butler: I think it would be hard to find a Minister more competent than my right hon. Friend the Paymaster-General to answer for these subjects. Her Majesty's Government have absolute confidence in him as the Minister representing the Minister of Power in this House.

NUCLEAR TESTS

Mr. A. Henderson: asked the Prime Minister whether he will give an assurance, in view of the widespread concern in Japan at the prospect of hydrogen bombs being exploded in the Pacific, that, after the first explosion, no further hydrogen bombs will be exploded pending the outcome of the present United Nations disarmament discussions.

Mr. R. A. Butler: I have been asked to reply.
I have nothing to add to what my right hon. Friend the Minister of Supply told the right hon. and learned Member on 18th March.

Mr. Henderson: Why is it that the Government are now opposed as


announced in the Bermuda communiqué, to any limitation on nuclear tests? Why will not one hydrogen bomb explosion give the Government the basis of parity which they desire with the United States and Russian Governments?

Mr. Butler: The Prime Minister has made it quite clear, as he did on 19th March, the day following the Answer to which I referred, that Her Majesty's Government are not prepared to abandon tests in advance of a comprehensive disarmament agreement which affords proper safeguards and effective controls.

Mr. Gaitskell: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that that statement goes back on an earlier statement made by Sir Anthony Eden, who promised that the Government would be prepared to try and seek agreement on hydrogen bomb tests independently of any general disarmament agreement? Can he explain the reason for the change?

Mr. Butler: There is an Answer to be given to Question No. 50 which brings into line the agreement reached at Bermuda and which deals with the problem of world radiation and the effects of tests on that.

Mr. P. Noel-Baker: Is it not more than eighteen months since the Government began to tell us that they were ready for some limitation of tests? When will they make some practical proposal to this end?

Mr. Butler: We have just had some very successful and, I think, important conversations with the leaders of the United States Government in this matter. We realise that the security of the free world must continue to depend to a marked degree upon the nuclear deterrent. To maintain this effectively, nuclear testing must continue, certainly for the present.

Mr. Gaitskell: Is the Lord Privy Seal aware that there is widespread agreement that the least satisfactory part of the Bermuda communiqué was that relating to H-bomb tests? Why do the Government continue to refrain from putting forward proposals for a conference designed to end H-bomb tests altogether?

Mr. Butler: For the reasons I have given, that there are national interests at stake which we are not prepared to abandon.

SHIPBUILDING AND ENGINEERING INDUSTRIES (DISPUTES)

Mr. Robens: (by Private Notice) asked the Minister of Labour whether he will make a statement about the disputes in the shipbuilding and engineering industries.

The Minister of Labour and National Service (Mr. Iain Macleod): Direct negotiations began yesterday between the Shipbuilding Employers' Federation and the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions on the Confederation's wages claim, but broke down late in the afternoon. Representatives of both sides were then invited to the Ministry for further discussions with my officers. It became clear that no progress was possible by way of conciliation and I decided to appoint a Court of Inquiry to inquire into the dispute. In view of this decision the unions were asked to call off the strike. The unions have not given their answer to that request, but both they and the employers have indicated their readiness to co-operate fully with the Court. The union representatives have had meetings with me and my officers today and further discussions with both sides, which will relate to both the shipbuilding and to the engineering disputes, are due to take place later in the day.

Mr. Robens: The whole House will share the disappointment which the right hon. Gentleman, no doubt, feels that the high note of optimism which was struck yesterday was not borne out by reality. Does the Court of Inquiry depend upon the stoppage of the dispute so that it can meet, or does the right hon. Gentleman propose to hold the Court of Inquiry whether or not the dispute continues? May I say to the Minister that we hope that the further discussions that are taking place today with both sides might result in agreement despite the present little setback?

Mr. Macleod: I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for what he has said. It is quite true that I had high hopes yesterday, and so had everybody closely concerned with the dispute, but the direct discussions broke down and it seemed to me that we must try, as I did,


another approach at once. It is important that both sides have agreed to cooperate with the Court of Inquiry. What we are now endeavouring to do—and talks are going on now—is to find a formula by which the strike may end. Whether those discussions succeed or riot, I intend to go ahead with the Court of Inquiry, having received the undertaking that both sides will co-operate with it.

Mr. Lee: Is it the right hon. Gentleman's purpose that the Court of Inquiry should discuss the dispute as it now is and as we all know it, or will it discuss the background against which the dispute arose? The right hon. Gentleman will remember that hp said earlier that there was not a lot of purpose in having a Court of Inquiry because the issues were clear.

Mr. Macleod: The purpose of the Court of Inquiry would be to examine the dispute, and that largely is the position as it is now. The two main elements in that are, no doubt, the agreement, which has not yet been made public, which was tentatively come to between the two sides and the gap between the offer and the claim on which talks broke down yesterday.

Mr. Eden: Can my right hon. Friend clarify this point? Is the Court of Inquiry related only to the shipbuilding industry or to the whole of the shipbuilding and engineering industries? Further, will it investigate the restrictive practices in the shipbuilding industry?

Mr. Macleod: It is not possible to give an exact answer. I intended last night, when I set up the Court of Inquiry, that it should be confined, in the first place, at least, to the shipbuilding industry, but certain proposals have been put to me by the unions which are now being discussed with the employers and on the outcome of those talks will depend whether we have one Court of Inquiry, two Courts of Inquiry or, perhaps, two Courts of Inquiry composed of the same people taking place simultaneously.
As regards the second part of my hon. Friend's question, it is, of course, true that some of those matters are referred to in the document which was the basis of agreement on which wage negotiations were reopened yesterday.

Mr. Ellis Smith: In considering the terms of reference of the Court of Inquiry, has the Minister made up his mind about the advisability of allowing the principle of mutuality to operate, so as to get the best results from both sides? Before the right hon. Gentleman finally decides, will he consider doing it by consultation with both sides?

Mr. Macleod: I have not yet made up my mind on the terms of reference for the Court of Inquiry. They depend very much on the talks that are going on and will go on for the rest of the day.

NEW MEMBER SWORN

Robert William Elliott, esquire, for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, North.

Orders of the Day — RENT BILL

[1ST ALLOTTED DAY]

As amended (in the Standing Committee), considered.

New Clause.—(RESTRICTION ON REQUIR ING PAYMENT IN ADVANCE OF RENT UNDER DECONTROLLED TENANCIES.)

(1) Where a tenancy is granted, continued or renewed in circumstances in which section twelve of this Act applies, any requirement that rent shall be payable—

(a) before the beginning of the rental period in respect of which it is payable, or
(b) earlier than six months before the end of the rental period in respect of which it is payable, if that period is more than six months long,
shall be void, whether the requirement is imposed as a condition of the grant, renewal or continuance of the tenancy or under the terms thereof; and rent for any rental period to which a requirement avoided by this section relates shall be irrecoverable from the tenant.

(2) A person who purports to impose any requirement avoided by the foregoing subsection shall be liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding one hundred pounds, and the court by which he is convicted may order any amount of rent paid in compliance with the requirement to be repaid to the person by whom it was paid.—[Mr. H. Brooke.]

Brought up, and read the First time.

3.37 p.m.

The Minister of Housing and Local Government and Minister for Welsh Affairs (Mr. Henry Brooke): I beg to move, That the Clause be read a Second time.
This new Clause is designed to tighten up the provision, which was made in Standing Committee, against the demanding of premiums by a landlord. The point is that one needs to cover the case where rent is demanded so definitely in advance that it is in the nature of a premium rather than a normal rent. The matter arises in connection with Clause 12 and the prohibition on the charging of premiums for the tenancies of houses decontrolled under Clause 10 (1) which are granted within three years of decontrol or tenancies decontrolled under Clause 10 (2) and granted within three years after the commencement of the Act.
I said in Committee that it was my desire to ensure that the provisions forbidding premiums were made as foolproof

as possible. That is why I am bringing forward this Clause, which provides that if any rent under a tenancy which is subject to the premium provisions in Clause 12 is demanded further in advance than the beginning of the rental period to which it relates—it may be a week, a month or longer—that that sum will be treated as a premium and will be irrecoverable from the tenant. This means that if the tenant has not paid it he cannot be made to do so and the landlord will lose it. I think that that will seldom happen because, if the House agrees to the new Clause, the landlord will be careful not to behave in this way.
There is a further prohibition in the now Clause against a demand of rent more than six months in advance of the end of the rental period. That is designed to close a further loophole which might otherwise exist. To take a purely hypothetical example, the landlord might let a house on a lease of fourteen years and demand the whole of the rent for all those fourteen years at the beginning. That would clearly be more, in the nature of a premium than a rent.
Therefore, we are providing in the Clause against the sum being demanded longer in advance than six months before the end of the rental period. The House will see that the new Clause will be effective in closing two possible loopholes. It imposes a maximum fine of £100 for an infringement and empowers the court to order the repayment of any amount wrongfully demanded and paid.

Mr. C. W. Gibson: This is a point which I raised in Committee and I am very glad indeed that the Minister has proposed the new Clause to meet it. I have had nothing very much to say by way of congratulation to the Government on the Bill, but this is an opportunity of saying that I agree with the Minister's action if only because it will solve a rather serious problem that has cropped up in my part of London on more than one occasion. I hope, therefore, that the House will accept the Clause.

Mr. John Hay: I entirely approve of the outline of what the Clause does and I am sure that the whole House will be at one with the Minister in saying that the intention is one which ought to be incorporated in the Bill. Undoubtedly, a number of rackets have been


going on in connection with new tenancies where premiums have been disguised in the form of payments of rent long in advance. But I am anxious about the effect of this provision in connection with new tenancies under Clause 10 (2), which enables a tenancy to be created free of the Rent Restrictions Acts altogether after the coming into force of the Bill.
May not the new Clause be a little too wide in its terms? I am sure that the whole House would not want to stop the perfectly normal and sensible arrangement for payment of rent, weekly, monthly or perhaps quarterly, in advance. That is often a prudent thing for a landlord to demand, because if he runs the risk of taking as tenant someone of whom he knows little he may find himself with arrears of rent owing. If the Clause is inserted in the Bill, I think that any kind of payment in advance would be covered. Therefore, it would be a criminal offence, carrying a penalty of £100, if the landlord were to ask a tenant, on giving him a new tenancy, to pay rent regularly weekly, monthly, or quarterly in advance.
I hope that the use in the new Clause of the words
 before the beginning of the rental period…
may cover my point and that, if a landlord asks for payment of a week's, month's or quarter's rent in advance at the beginning of the rental period and not before the beginning of the period, that perfectly normal and customary commercial arrangement will be allowed to continue. I hope that that is so, because I do not think that the House wants to strike at that sort of transaction.
I believe that what my right hon. Friend and all of us want to strike at is the payment of large sums of money as rent in advance which really are premiums. I did not give my right hon. Friend notice earlier of this point, but I think that it is one which he might like to look at again, particularly when the Bill is being debated in another place.
3.45 p.m.
We do not want to stop prudent transactions to minimise the risk of arrears of rent, but we do want to stop this racket. If my right hon. Friend feels that my interpretation of the words
before the beginning of the rental period …

covers the point I shall be quite happy, but if it does not I should be grateful if he would look into the matter and consider whether something can be done in another place to put the situation right.

Mr. Graham Page: I support the Clause. I joined with the hon. Member for Clapham (Mr. Gibson) in Committee in saying that this provision was necessary to support the Clause in the Bill which relates to premiums. Undoubtedly, there was an opportunity of getting round the premium Clause unless a new Clause such as this was provided, but I have one or two questions to ask on the new Clause because I think it is doubtful whether it will be effective as it is drawn at present. I ask the questions not necessarily to obtain answers today, but in the hope that the points will go on the record and will be dealt with at a later stage in another place.
First, a tenancy, of course, can provide for a variable rent. The rent Clause as drawn does not prevent rent being demanded in advance. Therefore, if there were a tenancy—to take an exaggerated example—for 12 months, of which the rent was £300 for the first six months and £3 for the next six months, it does not seem to me that that tenancy would be caught by the Clause, because the first £300 would be for rental, as the Clause allows. Can my right hon. Friend stop up that loophole with some provision for spreading the rent in such cases over the whole period?
My second point is on the word "requirement". I wonder whether it is sufficient in the circumstances. Let us suppose that the landlord merely says to a prospective or sitting tenant, "Mr. X has offered me two years' rent in advance. I do not require you to pay two years' rent in advance, but what are you going to do about it?" There is nothing in the Clause to prevent the landlord accepting the advanced rent. The Clause is only against his requiring it. If there were in the Clause not only a requirement but a prohibition of acceptance of rent in advance the Clause would certainly be strengthened.
My third point is that, by reference to the premium Clause, this Clause applies to a tenancy excluded from the application of the Rent Acts by subsections (1) and (2) of what is now Clause 10, that


is to say, a dwelling-house of a certain rateable value on a certain date, namely, 7th November, 1956, or a dwelling-house let after that date.
Suppose that there is a tenant, in controlled premises, of part of a house who wishes to take another room or rooms in the same house. A tenancy to that tenant of the existing rooms which he already occupies, plus something extra, does not cause the property to become decontrolled. It is caught by the proviso to subsection (2). Therefore, in these circumstances, a landlord could demand rent in advance. He could not demand a premium, because he would be prevented by the existing Rent Acts from demanding a premium on controlled property, but he would not be caught under this Clause because he could demand rent in advance. Perhaps that is a point which my right hon. Friend would look into.
The fourth point is whether, under this Clause, the rent overpaid is recoverable in the county court as a debt as well as if the landlord is prosecuted to conviction. Under subsection (2) of the new Clause, the court may return this overpaid rent if the landlord is prosecuted; that is, the police court may return it. But people do not like to go to the police court, and if this can be recoverable in the county court I think that the Clause will be far more effective. What I would ask is whether this is recoverable only if the landlord is prosecuted to conviction or whether it can be the subject of a civil claim.
The fifth point is that I notice that the court "may" order the return of the amount. Why this discretion in the hands of the court? If we are, in fact, prohibiting the overpayment of rent, why is it left to the court's discretion whether it should be returned, if the landlord is convicted for having acquired it, having been paid that overpayment of rent in advance?
The sixth point—and I have about eight—is this. If the rent is returned, does that relieve the tenant altogether of the payment of the rent for that particular period? Suppose the landlord has demanded rent for 12 months in advance and he is prosecuted for that, and the court orders the return to the tenant of the rent for six months of that period.
Is the tenant, under this Clause, relieved altogether of the payment of rent for that six months? It would seem so, according to the latter part of subsection (1), which says that
rent for any rental period to which a requirement avoided by this section relates shall be irrecoverable from the tenant.
If that is so, I can see two possible rackets by unscrupulous tenants.
One would come about in this way. The Clause requires the rent overpaid in this way to be repaid to the person by whom it was paid. Those words come in the last line of the new Clause. Suppose that the tenant, who has paid his rent for a long period in advance in this way, in the meantime assigns his tenancy, and that he has obtained from the assignee an apportionment of the rent which he has paid in advance. The assignee cannot recover that from the landlord who received it, because he does not come within what this Clause calls the "person by whom it was paid." The assignor, that is, the original tenant, can recover it from the landlord and can also recover it from the person to whom he has assigned his lease. Unless we have a little tidying up of the wording, I am afraid that it may be that the original tenant will get his money twice over.
Lastly, and this is the second possible racket by unscrupulous tenants, again assuming that the tenant has paid excessive rent in advance in this way, and again taking the example of a person who has paid it for a year and claims back six months' rent, he could he rent-free, apparently, for the second six month of the 12 months for which he overpaid. Then, he could sublet and get his rent twice over, because he could get it again from the sub-tenant, while being free from rent to the landlord. This, I believe, would be quite permissible under the wording of the new Clause, and that is why I raise the point. I believe that the wording requires tidying up, and I therefore ask my right hon. Friend whether he will look at these points.

Mr. Barnett Janner: I was rather disturbed by the speech which has just been made by the hon. Member for Crosby (Mr. Page), and particularly by the emphasis which he laid on the ingenuity of the tenant, which, in his experience, no doubt, as well as in mine, has not been so obvious in the last


forty years. What has been obvious is something which I hope the Minister will consider between now and the further stages of the Bill in another place.
There is a device practised which, I think, needs to be very carefully watched concerning this question of premiums. It is that a landlord purports to sell his house to the tenant, takes a fairly large sum, which is, in effect, a premium, and gives a mortgage to the tenant. The tenant still has to pay rent, and if he fails to pay the rent the mortgage is called in. The result is that this purported sale turns out to be a tenancy in which a premium has been taken, and in which the tenant continues to pay his rent, which purports to be a mortgage repayment, until such time as he can no longer pay it.
That trick, which has been very extensively practised, should be watched very carefully. The Minister should not be so concerned about possible trickery so far as tenants are concerned, but should direct his attention towards some of the subterfuges adopted by landlords who have obtained large premiums without the practice being revealed until the tenant was compelled to leave.

Mr. H. Brooke: This short debate has of itself shown how close and intricate is the knowledge possessed by hon. Members on both sides of the House on these complicated matters with which the Bill deals. I was grateful to the hon. Member for Leicester, North-West (Mr. Janner) for saying that he would not demand an immediate answer to the question he put. It was a somewhat abstruse one, and I will certainly undertake that the Government will examine it before the Bill is considered in Committee in another place.
In reply to my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (Mr. Hay), I can assure him that the words "before the beginning" in para. (a) of subsection (1) of the new Clause do not exclude "at the beginning." Therefore, a payment in advance that is made at the beginning of any tenancy is not hit by the new Clause. By a payment in advance, he and I mean in this context the ordinary payment of rent at the outset of a rental period.
My hon. Friend the Member for Crosby (Mr. Page) asked me a series of seven or eight questions without notice. I certainly do not blame him

for that, but he will excuse me if I cannot give him a complete answer at short notice. He asked whether it would be possible for a landlord to demand a high rent for an initial rental period and then a much lower rent for the second period. I am not quite sure what he would gain by that, because there would be no chance whatever of his establishing that the high first payment was not a receipt by way of income, and, therefore, taxable, and one of the dangers in the whole premium affair is that the landlord may succeed in establishing, though he will have to be very clever to establish it against the scrupulous attention of the Inland Revenue, that a lump payment is a receipt by way of capital and not by way of income.
4.0 p.m.
My hon. Friend called attention to the words "requirement ". I think he will find that this is the regular word used in previous Acts of Parliament dealing with matters of this kind, and it is the best word that can be used. He also asked whether the rent would be recoverable through the county court. No, that is not the case in this instance. The landlord would need to be prosecuted and convicted and then the court, if it convicts him, can direct the return of the premium. He questioned the word "may" in subsection (2). I think he will find that in all previous legislation relating to premiums it has always been a permissive power that has been given to the court to order the return of the premium.
As regards the cases of unscrupulous tenants, to which my hon. Friend also referred, it seems to me that any trouble which arose here would have to start by arising from an unscrupulous landlord. Therefore, the landlord could hardly complain if the tenant tried to play back the same game against him. As the proposed Clause stands, it means that the sum which is paid in advance, and, therefore, treated as a premium under this Clause, will be irrecoverable from the tenant, who cannot be made subsequently by the landlord to pay it.
I am sorry if I am not able completely to satisfy my hon. Friend on all his points. I realise the difficulty which the House is in over examining a proposed Clause which it first sees on the Report stage. However, no Amendments were put down, the Clause has


had a general welcome, and with the assurance that the Government will have it examined further I hope that the House will now agree to add the Clause to the Bill.

Sir Patrick Spens: I want to refer to one point in the reply of my right hon. Friend. That is the fact that a premium paid contrary to both the existing law and, in the future, contrary to this proposed Clause, is not recoverable in the county court, but only by first bringing a criminal prosecution and then hoping to get the whole or part of the premium returned if the judge so thinks fit.
I want to press most strongly for a real change in that law. It is important that a premium paid contrary to the law shall be repayable on demand and recoverable at once in the county court. Otherwise, I am certain that there will be a large number of premiums paid and that people will hesitate to prosecute their landlords before the magistrate. I am sure that the only effective remedy is to alter the law in this respect. The existing law has proved to be useless in stopping premiums, and I am sure that the only certain way of stopping this practice is to make the illegal payment recoverable at once on demand in the county court.
I hope that my right hon. Friend will consider this point carefully, and will introduce the necessary changes in the Bill in another place to make it effective.

Sir Ian Horobin: I intervene to add my voice to what has just been said from my own small experience as a social worker. There is no doubt that the ordinary person does not like to be mixed up in the courts. Sometimes, indeed, people seem to have the odd idea that it does not matter whether they are in the dock or in the witness box they do not want to be there at all. Ordinary working folk also, although they do not mind going to the county court if necessary, are not too keen about it. However, they are used to going to the county court for all kinds of things, sometimes treating it almost as a kind of conciliation officer. From the practical point of view of making the Bill work, which is what we all want, I hope that before it finally passes through

Parliament the Minister will consider whether something can be done on this point.
I will add one rather different type of argument, but, nevertheless, a strong one. There are some suggestions on the Notice Paper which raise the same point in quite a different and rather unacceptable way. I hope that my right hon. Friend will object to them strongly, as many of us on this side of the House object to them strongly. My right hon. Friend might be well advised to try to meet the general feeling that this should be a civil matter and not a criminal matter in a way which would recommend itself to every hon. Member on this side of the House, lest he adds weight to suggestions which are, if we reach them, to be put forward for dealing with this matter in a way which certainly would divide his followers deeply.
For that reason, apart from any other, my right hon. Friend would be well advised to consider whether he cannot introduce civil procedure into this generally acceptable question of forbidding premiums and advance payments.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause read a Second time, and added to the Bill.

New Clause.—(MINIMUM LENGTH OF NOTICE TO QUIT.)

No notice to quit any premises let (whether before or after the commencement of this Act) as a dwelling shall be valid unless it is given not less than four weeks before the date on which it is to take effect.—[Mr. Bevins.]

Brought up, and read the First time.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Housing and Local Government (Mr. J. R. Bevins): I beg to move, That the Clause be read a Second time.
This proposed Clause, which, in a different form, has had an outing already in Standing Committee, applies both to Scotland and to England and Wales, and it seeks to extend the minimum period of notice to quit from one week to a minimum of four weeks. This constitutes quite an important change in the relations of landlords and tenants. It recognises, as I think the House will, that a period of only one week is uncivilised and inappropriate to the times in which we live.
This proposal may apply to all lettings which are determinable by notice to quit. It applies both to furnished and to unfurnished lettings, and not only to private lettings but also to lettings by local authorities. It would not apply, of course, to lettings which had been agreed for a fixed term of so many weeks or months, and which expired in the ordinary way by the effluxion of time without the need for any notice to quit. Such things as holiday lettings, therefore, would not be covered by this provision.
In the early stages this reform would apply to houses which are to become decontrolled under Clause 10 (1), or on the letting or reletting of houses when the Act comes into operation. I think that the House will see that as the lower rated houses become free from control, as we believe they will do in the course of time, then this provision will have increasing application and be a considerable benefit to many people.

Mr. G. R. Mitchison: The Opposition welcomes the new Clause in this Guillotine Bill. We differ from the Parliamentary Secretary in thinking that it will make extraordinarily little difference. It certainly will not in the case of council houses. I do not think that it would at present in the case of ordinary tenanted houses. It is, however, possible that the Bill as a whole will cause such chaos and difficulty in ordinary relations between landlord and tenant that the Government are wise to provide this slight mitigation in favour of the tenant.

Sir I. Horobin: As it was I who introduced the original provision in Committee, I should like to say how pleased I am that it received the support of the Government immediately and has now been introduced in a slightly different form.
It is typical of the approach of hon. Members opposite to housing matters that as soon as an important and practical housing reform is introduced they are so angry that they did not think of it that they immediately try to crab it. It was noticeable that their first effort upstairs was desperately to try to think that they could hope that it would not apply to council houses at all. I have the OFFICIAL REPORT of the Standing Committee with me, but I will not weary the House by quoting from it. The Opposition's

approach was, first, that it did not matter, and, secondly, that it must be possible for a local authority to turn somebody out on to the street with the shortest possible notice if that was desired.

Mr. Mitchison: That is quite untrue.

Hon. Members: Read what was said.

Sir I. Horobin: The hon. Member for Kettering (Mr. Mitchison) said:
 Before the hon. Gentleman rises to withdraw, if he is going to do so….
That was myself, in response to the Government's decision.
 … may I just ask him one question? We are quite clear, are we not, that though a tenant of a council house has a tenancy and had a tenancy terminable by notice, this new Clause is not intended to apply to that type of case?"—[OFFICIAL REPORT, Standing Committee A, 5th March, 1957; c. 1149.)
The point is that today it should be impossible for a landlord to give such a short notice as one week, whether the landlord is a council or a private person, whether the landlord is in England or Scotland, whether the landlord is a housing association or anything else. It is no longer consonant with our social sense that ordinary people should live at the risk of a week's notice.
As more and more houses will be decontrolled as time goes on, the abolition of the weekly tenancy is a thoroughly good and long-overdue reform. I am sure that when a great deal of the pother about the Bill has passed into limbo, more and more people will have reason to be grateful that the Government have accepted a suggestion which has the support of many people of all parties outside the House and made it part of our law.

Mr. F. J. Bellenger: I would remind the House that the courts have consistently condemned the way in which previous Rent Acts have been drawn. I should like to know whether the effect of the Clause is to convert weekly tenancies into four-weekly tenancies. If the provision is to apply to the landlord, am I right in assuming that it would apply to the tenant? The tenant will want to know his position, especially at a time when, if the Government are right, more houses and flats will be available. The tenant will want to know whether he is bound, as the landlord is, to give four weeks' notice.
Perhaps the Minister can tell me whether my interpretation of the Clause is correct.

4.15 p.m.

Mr. Page: I have two more questions for my right hon. Friend, and I apologise for not having given him notice of them. Both questions arise out of "let" in the Clause. The phrase is:
 No notice to quit any premises let…as a dwelling….
That would, of course, include service tenancies. I wonder whether that is intended.
As to my second point, I take it that it would not include licences granted to occupiers of requisitioned dwellings. It is the practice of local authorities to let requisitioned dwellings not by means of an ordinary tenancy but by licence. Consequently, the occupier is not a tenant but a licensee. It has been held again and again that such property is not let to the occupier; the occupier is not paying rent, and the Rent Acts do not apply.
If local authorities are to be bound by the Clause in relation to their ordinary letting of council houses, I should have thought it would be reasonable to bind them to the Clause in respect of the licences of requisitioned houses. Perhaps my right hon. Friend will look into the possibility of altering "let" or adding words to cover the licensing of an occupier.

Mr. Hay: There is a point arising from what was said by the right hon. Member for Bassetlaw (Mr. Bellenger) which, I hope, my right hon. Friend will examine carefully. I hope it will be made clear beyond a peradventure that the alteration in the law which is being made applies on both sides, that it will not be just the landlord's notice to quit which is affected but also the tenant's notice.
I was glad to hear the right hon. Member for Bassetlaw say that a great deal of new accommodation would come on the market. He is right. When that accommodation comes forward the Clause will prove its value.
I would point out, however, that the Clause will not affect statutory tenancies which have already commenced to run. I refer here to statutory tenancies under

the Rent Acts which have followed contractual tenancies, weekly, monthly or for a period of years, which have been determined by a notice to quit some time in the past. Although the Clause has some retrospective effect, I do not think that it operates to affect notices given in the past, which have had the effect of converting contractual or, as they are called under the Bill, controlled tenancies into statutory tenancies.

Mr. Julius Silverman: If the hon. Gentleman is correct, surely the Clause will affect only council houses.

Mr. Hay: Council houses are not affected by the Rent Acts. I am talking about statutory tenancies only. The effect of the Clause will be to deal only with new tenancies created after the commencement of operation of the Measure. There will be no effect upon statutory tenancies which have arisen consequent upon notice to quit given in the past.
This is a very desirable alteration in the law. My right hon. Friend was right to say that nowadays we are a little more civilised than we were in the past and that there should be a month's notice to quit. It is wrong that people should be turned out at a week's notice. The Clause will cause some problems for landlords, but I think that, in conjunction with the point that I made on the last Clause about rent being paid in advance as part of a normal commercial transaction, most landlords should be able to safeguard themselves against arrears under this Clause by granting tenancies with rent payable in advance but payable only at the begining of the tenancy.

Mr. Bevins: I think that we may be able to dispose of one or two of these question quite quickly. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Bassetlaw (Mr. Bellenger) and my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (Mr. Hay) asked whether this provision imposed an obligation upon the tenant as well as upon the landlord. The answer to that is quite clear: this provision operates both ways. The responsibility is upon the tenant as well as upon the landlord.
The question was also asked whether this provision applied to service tenancies, and the answer is that it does. As regards requisitioned houses, which was a point mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member


for Crosby (Mr. Page), as these are matters of licences rather than of letting it does not apply to that particular form of licensing.
On the point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Henley, I think that the position is that where a weekly tenancy is current at the commencement of the Act there is just room for argument on lines familiar to my hon. Friend as to whether, without the words
… (whether before or after the commencement of this Act)…,
this Amendment would not interfere with such tenancies. The insertion of these words is designed to remove all doubt that all existing tenancies are covered. I do not think that there is any doubt about that particular point.
I would ask the House to bear in mind that as regards houses which will presently be coming out of decontrol, under Clause 10 notice to quit, as the House well knows, is not a matter of one week or of four weeks, but, of course, of six months.

Mr. Hay: I do not think that my hon. Friend quite understood what I was driving at and I am not surprised, because I put it very badly. I want to be sure that the retrospective effect of the words which he has read out:
… (whether before or after the commencement of this Act)…
will not affect the position of statutory tenancies which have been created perhaps years ago by a week's notice to quit given at that time.
The general position is that if one has an ordinary contractual tenancy for a week or a month one can convert it under the present Rent Acts, by giving a week or a month's notice to quit, into a statutory tenancy. I want to be sure that this does not operate retrospectively to reconvert these statutory tenancies back into contractual tenancies thereby requiring fresh notice to quit to be served throughout the country. That is the point. I know that it is a difficult one to answer straight away, but I should be glad if my hon. Friend would look into it.

Mr. Bevins: My right hon. Friend will be glad to consider that point.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause read a Second time, and added to the Bill.

New Clause. —(CONCURRENCE OF SUPERIOR LANDLORDS TO AGREE MENTS AS TO 1956 GROSS VALUE AND RATEABLE VALUE.)

Where the landlord is himself a tenant, then unless he is tenant under a tenancy having a term with more than seven years to run an agreement between him and his tenant relating to the amount of the 1956 gross value or of the rateable value of the dwelling-house shall not have effect for the purposes of this Act except with the concurrence in writing of his immediate landlord.—[Mr. Bevins.]

Brought up, and read the First time.

Mr. Bevins: I beg to move, That the Clause be read a Second time.
Perhaps I may say at the start that this Clause also applies to Scotland. The Clause deals with the case of a dwelling let by a superior landlord to a mesne tenant who, in turn, sub-lets part of the dwelling to a sub-tenant. The Clause provides that the mesne tenant can come to an agreement with the sub-tenant to apportion the rateable value of his part of the dwelling, either the gross rateable value or the net rateable value or both, only with the consent in writing of the superior landlord.
Perhaps I might illustrate very briefly what this Clause means and how it will work, if one supposes the case of a mesne tenant who is a statutory or a contractual tenant and who is also affected by the decontrol provisions of Clause 10. Suppose, in a case such as that, the rateable value of the dwelling is, let us say, £90. Suppose that particular mesne tenant knows that, for some reason or another, at the end of the 15 months' standstill period he will have to vacate the premises, in such a case, if the subtenant occupies half of the house, in the ordinary course of events the apportionment of rateable value would be about £45, which would be in respect of the sub-tenant's accommodation. But it is conceivable, if the mesne tenant were not going to have any further interest in his own tenancy, that he might, out of pique against the superior landlord, agree to an apportionment of rateable value with the subtenant which would be prejudicial and unfair to the superior landlord.
He might, for example, say, "I will agree to an apportionment of rateable value of £25 gross and £20 net" and in that way the sub-tenant, who, in the ordinary case, might perhaps become decontrolled on becoming the tenant of


the superior landlord, would remain controlled and would in future pay a lower rent to the superior landlord than he ought to do. That is briefly the objective of the Clause. It seeks to prevent that sort of practice by the mesne tenant who might feel aggrieved by his superior landlord and I hope that the House will be willing to accept it.

Mr. Mitchison: In this guillotined Bill we on this side of the House see no objection to the Clause and good reason for it.

Sir P. Spens: The only point I want to raise is this. As the Bill is drafted, there is an alternative to an agreement between the landlord and the tenant as regards apportionment, namely, that it can, if necessary, be determined by the county court.
This new Clause, I assume, does not in any way prevent, if the superior landlord refuses to agree or if the immediate landlord refuses to agree, the tenant going to the county court to get the gross rateable value properly apportioned.

Mr. Bevins: I think that the short answer to that is that this new Clause does not in any way affect the provisions which are already in the Bill, but deals with a particular case which is not covered by the existing provisions.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause read a Second time, and added to the Bill.

New Clause.—(LIMITATION ON EXCESSIVE RENTS.)

1. As respects grant renewal continuance or assignment during the period of three years beginning with the commencement of this Act a tenancy excluded from the application of the Rent Acts by the provisions of this Act shall be treated as one to which the following provisions apply.

2.Where a landlord requires as a condition of the grant renewal continuance or assignment of a tenancy during the period of three years beginning with the commencement of this Act a rental in excess of the amount prescribed in section one of this Act save and except that the multiple contained therein shall be for the purposes of this section two and a half times the 1956 gross value of the dwelling-house instead of twice the 1956 gross value as prescribed in section one, such requirement shall be unlawful and such increase as is required by the landlord shall be irrecoverable.

3.In the event of such requirement a tenant shall be entitled to retain possession of the

dwelling-house in like manner and subject to the like terms and conditions as if the Rent Acts had not ceased to apply to the dwelling-house for a period not to exceed three years.

4. In pursuance of the provisions contained in this section either party may apply to the County Court to determine whether any requirement by the landlord infringes the provisions of this section and for an order of the County Court accordingly.—[Mr. Rees-Davies.]

Brought up, and read the First time.

Mr. W. R. Rees-Davies: I beg to move, That the Clause be read a Second time.
This Clause, in the name of myself and some of my hon. Friends, provides a limitation against excessive rents. We on this side of the House believe in the aims and principles of the Bill, but many of us view with deep concern the ill-effects which the Bill may have unless further safeguards are included to ensure that owners cannot obtain unjust enrichment at the expense of tenants.
I would remind the House of the words which the Prime Minister wrote in his book, "The Middle Way." in 1938. It was an admirable hook and it expressed fears at that time for the feelings of the middle classes of this country. He said:
 Insecurity has an adverse effect on health almost equal to the actual endurance of poverty.
These are profound words. Many of us in this country are at present concerned with fears of tenants, whether those tenants are right or wrong in the expression of those fears.
No one, I believe, would say that his judgment about the future of the Bill would necessarily be right. I stand here profoundly hoping that what I say will prove to be wrong, but it is because I have a very great conviction that I may be right that I believe that something along the lines of this new Clause, which provides a ceiling rental for a period of three years only, should be included in the Bill.
4.30 p.m.
My hon. Friend the then Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, moving the Second Reading of the Bill, said:
… decontrol cannot be sudden or immediate. It must allow for necessary readjustments, and the transition must be smoothed."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 21st November, 1956; Vol. 560, c. 1765.]


In all quarters of the House, hon. Members will agree with the sentiments expressed by those words. Since the Second Reading a good deal has been done to provide further safeguards. Whether we think they go far enough or not, it would be idle to deny that the Government have introduced substantial further safeguards for security of tenure. Premiums have been outlawed and I hope and trust that, following the remarks of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington, South (Sir P. Spens), measures will be taken at a later stage to prevent premiums being obtained.
If we are to deal with premiums, which prevent one type of unjust enrichment, it is only logical to prevent what is an excessive rent, which is another form of unjust enrichment. If one is satisfied that too high a rent will be payable in an open market, it is certainly not against Tory philosophy that we should have control, when it is in the interests of the country that there should be such control. As Tories we set our faces against control only where we regard it as unnecessary. If they are proved to be necessary, then it is vital that we should have safeguards.
There is a fundamental difference of judgment about what the outcome of the level of rents throughout the country will be. The purpose of the new Clause is to prevent rents from rising above a level which all hon Members, even those who do not share the views I am expressing, will none the less regard as not unreasonable.
The gross value of a property is its 1939 pre-letting value. Since 1939, the cost of living has risen two and a half times and to get an equivalent to the pre-war rent we arrive at two and a half times the pre-war value. There was not an acute housing shortage in London in 1939, nor was there a shortage in other cities. It is, therefore, fair that the rent should be allowed to rise to a level of up to two and a half times the gross value, the level that rents would normally find on supply and demand, but that that element should be removed in areas where there is an acute housing shortage. It is my belief, and the belief of those who are associated with me in this new Clause, that rents should not be permitted to rise substantially above such a level, should not be permitted to rise, for example, to

three and a half to four times the gross value.
I shall show in a moment that in some cases rents will no doubt rise to three and a half to four times the gross rateable value and it is undeniable that in the London area the overall level of rents may well rise to three times the gross value. Although it may be legitimate as applied to new property, where there are new conversions, that would be too high a level in other cases.
It would be quite useless for an hon. Member to express his own opinion on a matter of this kind. The House would not listen to that and I therefore propose to give the House four questions and answers by men whom I shall not name, because they are professional men in business, but whom I will indicate sufficiently to show at least the subject matter which leads them to their conclusions.
The first and most important question is, "What, in your view, is likely to be the level of rents in London in 18 months' time?" I have chosen London as one of the cities where there is still a housing shortage. I say straight away that the level of rents in the country generally will not exceed two and a half times the gross value. That view is based on the reports of surveyors and estate agents all over the country. In my own constituency, leading men have told me that, beyond doubt, there will not be such rises. I shall, therefore, try to speak objectively in this matter, as one whose own constituency is not affected, whatever people may say on the matter.
The answer to the question is given by one of the leading insurance companies and societies dealing in suburban properties. It said:
We deal in the suburban properties mainly, extensively in such areas as Sutton. In these areas in 18 months' time the level will be 3 times G.V. and slightly above for modern, slightly below for old. In a block of Sutton flats G.V. £52 p.a., present rent is £50 8s. 6d. exclusive. We obtain £150 p.a. for the future.
That is just over double the present rents, about two and a quarter times the existing amount and is almost exactly three times the gross value of the property.
The second question was, "What would you regard as a fair proposal as a landlord if the rent limit is to be applied?"
That was, assuming that there was to be such a rent limit, what would be a fair one? The answer was:
We have no hesitation in saying that 2½ times gross value is a fair proposal for landlords as an investment return for a temporary period. Three years would be a fair period.
The Clause refers to a period of three years and it is also the unanimous view of surveyors, leading landlords and others, including three of the most famous names among property surveyors in London, that there will be a pool in three years throughout the country, apart from central London. It is important to make that point, because those who suggest that there will never be a pool are flying in the face of evidence from every corner of the country. I say that as emphatically as I suggest that there should be some limit upon the rents.
The third question was, "Do you object to a temporary rent limit for a period of 3 years being a limit not to exceed 2½ times gross value?" The answer was:
Agreeable.
The fourth question was, "Are there any objections to 3 above particularly on the ground that the maximum in some areas, e.g., London, might become the minimum in the country?"
The answer to that was:
We manage properties outside London as well and do not think that a ceiling rent will raise the level of rents elsewhere.
They will find their level in a few months.
In addition to those replies, I will quote another from a firm which is certainly regarded as one of the top five of those who manage property in and around the London area. This firm said:
The level of rents is rising in the London area, they will be for old property at least 3 times G.V., for modern 3½. in the past year they were rising fast. Two examples:
Coram Street, W.C.2. Bloomsbury, 3 rooms, kitchen and bathroom, £350–400 exclusive. Strutton Ground, Westminster, 12 flats, £60 G.V., rents £325–350 exclusive, over 4 times G.V.
In the firm's view, in the short-term rents will rise still further. The firm goes on to say that two and a half times the gross value——
…would be a fair proposal for a temporary period of three years. Pool will be created in 3 years not before.

Mr. Bellenger: Do those rents include services?

Mr. Rees-Davies: They include services, but the basic rental would be about four times the gross value. The firm went on to say that the best proposal would be a rent of not more than two and a half times the gross value for all property, except where it is new property, where three times the gross value would not be excessive. It went on to say that it would be a reasonable return to have two and half times the gross value as the ceiling rent and it was emphatic in saying that that would cause no difference in the valuation of the country generally, because within a few months country districts would find their own levels.
If that be so, and those be the views expressed—no doubt there are contrary views which might be expressed by other surveyors and landlords—we are left with the need to decide what is the best position and the lesser of the two evils. If we take the solution of a free market and that turns out to be wrong, unhappiness may follow. If we apply this solution—I do not suggest for a moment that it is perfect—but if we accept a limited transition period of only three years—it is the same period as the Minister has prescribed with regard to premiums—we shall be going further and saying that it is not only premiums which are wrong, but that the logical outcome of stopping premiums is that we stop excessive rents, too, for a similar period.
I believe that this would enable us to get over the transition period and do it with a longer period of security of tenure. That is to say, the 18-month period of the standstill will lead to an incentive to the landlord to agree to some agreement if he can get his extra rent. If, in fact, he can do that, but he cannot do it at a rent which is not excessive, I believe that we shall get these agreements, and shall get over this short period.
May I say two things, in conclusion? First, I want to deal with why I suggest that this three-year period is so important. There are here four factors integrating one on the other. The first is the 4,500,000 properties coming out of control. The owners will take time to do their conversions and let off their kitchens. Mother will have to make up her mind about what she will do; or it may be a question of moving out grandma, or whatever else


it may happen to be. At the end of that time we shall get a great deal more accommodation in the city suburbs out of the existing accommodation, because where there are spare rooms it will pay the owners to make use of them.
My second point relates to the construction of new buildings, particularly blocks of flats, which have not been built anywhere in the big cities since the war, because it has not been worth while for property developers to build them. Now they will do so. They will have laid their plans and this will be the timetable. It takes four months to get through the negotiations with the local authorities and the town planning authorities concerned. It takes three months to deal with the lawyers, as many of us well know. It takes three months to deal with the quantity surveyors, and about three months to negotiate with the architects. It takes nine to 12 months for the building.
Therefore, it takes about two years to develop a block of flats, or other expensive factory or estate development. There is also the question of requisitioned property, and conversions of empty houses, such as in the Seven Sisters Road and other parts of London, and in the major cities. These properties are standing empty because it is not worth while for the owners to let them.
These factors will operate. There will be requisition, conversion, new houses, and the development of the houses which are old and owner-occupied and are coming on to the market. We must also bear in mind that the Ministry has said—I think rightly—that in 12 months it reckons that it will have increased the further output of houses. All the surveyors to whom I, at any rate, have spoken—they number about 30 throughout the London area and elsewhere—have one factor in common, and I challenge anyone to dispute this fact: that the optimum for the United Kingdom will be in the year 1960, three years from now. That will be when supply and demand will take effect.
If that be so—let me say straight away that perhaps I am wrong—a five-year security period is not necessary. It is only three years. But if I am wrong—and it is wise sometimes to be wrong in these matters—clearly, I am not wrong

in saying that some safeguard is needed to cover that period. Eighteen months is covered, but it is the other 18 months interregnum which is the difficulty. I believe that this Clause will meet that difficulty. I believe that it does not affect the principles of the Bill as I understand them, which are decontrol and the creation of a flexible market. Provided it is only excessive rents we are preventing, we shall not stop the free play of a reasonable market. It is because I believe this profoundly that I am moving this Motion.

4.45 p.m.

Mr. Robert Jenkins: I beg to second the Motion.
I think it fair to say that all of my hon. Friends who support this new Clause support the Bill as presented by the Government in its entirety. One of the questions I wish to put to the Minister is whether it is necessary for the total abolition of the controls on property of a rate-able value of over £40 a year in Greater London and £30 a year in the country should take place at the same time.
In the Bill there are other properties which are to be decontrolled, as has been mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for the Isle of Thanet (Mr. Rees-Davies). There are over 4½d million owner-occupied properties which, from the passing of this Bill, will be decontrolled. Secondly, after the passing of the Bill there will, in fact, be other empty property which exists today, and empty property in the future will become decontrolled in the matter of the rate-able value it has. Therefore, throughout the next few years there will come forward a large number of new house units or hereditaments which, over the years, will provide a pool.
The question arises whether in fifteen months there will be a sufficiently large pool in this country, particularly in the built-up areas and outskirts of London and in other large cities. The Minister definitely maintains that there will. On the best advice at his disposal, and on his own judgment, he affirms that there will be this pool. If the Minister be right, in those circumstances the rises in rents are not likely to be more than, say, two-and-a-half times. That is what the Minister has said in the past. Therefore, in order


to protect people who are frightened at present, and if the Minister really believes—I know he does—that in fifteen months the increase will not be more than about two-and-a-half times, is there any reason why we should not ensure that it will not be by accepting this new Clause?
From the evidence which I have been able to obtain since the Committee stage, when it will be remembered that I said that I was prepared to vote for the 15-month period, I have reason to suppose that fifteen months will not be sufficient time to create a pool and keep rents down to a reasonable figure as the Minister genuinely believes and hopes will be the fact. I wish to reiterate what has been said by my hon. Friend the Member for the Isle of Thanet. I cannot believe that the owners of unoccupied property will, in a period of fifteen months, have time to produce more than a trickle of new hereditaments to come into the market. I think the period must be longer than that.
There are large numbers of property-owners who will embark on the process of turning old houses into a number of flats now that they can get more or less any rent they like. Therefore, it will take at least the time that my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Thanet mentioned for all the gyrations to be gone through with local authorities, architects, quantity surveyors and the like. It will be a very considerable time before that trickle becomes a flood or a spate. I therefore submit to the Minister that fifteen months is too short a time.
I am satisfied, having had the privilege of talking to the Minister on one or two occasions, that he really knows where he is going. I believe he is doing absolutely the right thing in bringing forward the Bill, but I am asking him whether at this last moment, the Report stage, he is quite sure about the advice that he has received on the timing. It must be on the advice that he receives that my right hon. Friend makes up his mind. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors sent out a memorandum in which it said that the minimum time for this Bill to operate would be sixteen months, while the Institution of Auctioneers sent out a memorandum in which it said that the very minimum time would be twelve months.
I am informed that the Ministry of Housing and Local Government has not been in touch with either of those bodies for consultation purposes or with any other professional body which will be responsible for working this Bill and for advising landlords what action to take. I shall be glad if that statement can be corrected. My information is the same with regard to the principal societies engaged in property management. In the same way as the Minister of Labour and National Service would consult the T.U.C. on labour problems, so, in a major operation of this kind affecting about 860,000 families, consultation might have gone on with the professional bodies to get advice other than that given in their memoranda.
Completely supporting the Bill, as my hon. Friends and I do—[HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."] We believe that the Bill is a bold and courageous move to take, especially with the modifications that have already been made and a further modification on the line we think should be taken now. Since 1945 many Housing Acts have been passed. That of 1949 has been, in respect of some of its Sections, inoperative or a failure. Some of the Sections of other Housing Acts, such as the Housing Repairs and Rents Act, have been ineffective. In no case where Sections were ineffective did anybody suffer, and certainly not the tenants, who were no worse off than they were before.
In the event of the timing being wrong in the present case and of excessive rents being charged in built-up areas like London and the big cities, grave hardship and damage may ensue. Principally for that reason my hon. Friends and I have put down the proposed new Clause. If my right hon. Friend could have taken powers under Clause 10 (3) not only to increase the number of properties to be decontrolled but to deal with such chaos as might ensue after fifteen months—[HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."]—my hon. Friends and myself would not, I am certain, have put down the proposed new Clause.
Because I do not think the Minister can take that action, and believing that there is a strong possibility of hardship ensuing to scores, if not hundreds, of thousands of nice, pleasant families in fifteen months, I suggest that a stopper of two-and-a-half


times the gross value as the top limit of rent would be fair to the landlord and would be just to the tenant.

Mr. H. Brooke: I rise now because I feel sure that the House would wish to have views of the Government on the proposed new Clause before coming to a decision upon it.

Mr. Mitchison: I would ask the right hon. Gentleman to remember that on a guillotined Bill the House might conceivably like to hear the views of the Opposition. too.

Mr. Brooke: If I am not interrupted, I hope to sit down in order that the hon. and learned Member for Kettering (Mr. Mitchison) may rise before the Guillotine falls.
I take a less pessimistic view than does my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Thanet (Mr. Rees-Davies) of the way in which the market will work over the coming months and years. I would assure the House that I have informed myself as fully as I am able to do of the views of those who are expert in these matters. So far as I am aware, all the professional organisations and institutions which have any interest in the subject-matter of the Bill have communicated whatever views they may hold to me or my predecessor. We have made our own confidential inquiries where they seemed necessary. We also have at our disposal the wholecorpusof knowledge which is in the possession of the Valuation Office, which consists of people who are very well trained to form their own first-hand judgments of the situation in different parts of the country and are well placed to acquaint themselves with the views that are being taken in the professions concerned.

Mr. John Hynd: Will the right hon. Gentleman permit me to ask a question at this juncture? Was this invaluable information which is at the disposal of the Department used in connection with the 1954 Bill?

5.0 p.m.

Mr. Brooke: I have fifteen minutes at my disposal, in which I should like to address myself to this Bill. Despite what my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Thanet has said, I must point out that his new Clause would make a funda-

mental change in the concept of the Bill. As he knows, a number of Amendments were made in Committee which, I think he will agree, go far in the direction he has in mind. We have abolished premiums; we have extended the six months' standstill period to one of fifteen months, and—I attach the greatest importance to this—we have provided that if a landlord and his tenant can reach a mutual agreement within that period of fifteen months for a fresh tenancy lasting for at least three years, the new rent payable under the agreement can come into operation forthwith and the landlord will not have to wait until the end of the period to gain the benefit of the increased rent.
My hon. Friend wishes to go further than this and to enact that for the period of three years ahead a house or flat which comes out of control shall have its rent limited to an amount not more than two-and-a-half times the gross value. I presume that my hon. Friend realises that his Clause would render illegal even mutual agreements reached within the period of fifteen months, if those agreements provided for a rent in excess of two-and-a-half times the gross value. [HON. MEMBERS: "Why not?"] In my view it should be the purpose of the House to encourage and stimulate those mutual agreements rather than make them more difficult.
I have only a few minutes in which to speak, and I think that I can help the House best by defining what would be the practical effects of the new Clause. First, we should not do what the Government aim to do by Clause 10 (1), namely, to secure a free market. A free market carries with it all the known advantages in bringing more accommodation into the market. What we want to do above all is to stop this constant drain from the market of accommodation to let. The availability of this accommodation is shrinking all the time. We want to halt that process and reverse it, and the only effective way of doing so is to recreate a free market.
Clause 10 is largely directed at the large amount of under-occupied accommodation which exists—a far larger feature in the housing situation than the House or most of the commentators on the Bill have realised. It needs a free market to bring into full availability all


the under-occupied accommodation which is known to exist within the relevant range of rateable value.
I want to be perfectly fair to my hon. Friend's argument. He says that my conception is good in the long run but will not operate sufficiently quickly, and that not enough will have happened within a period of fifteen months to make it safe to decontrol without a rent limit. I disagree with hint. His argument seemed to rest largely upon the expectation that in order to bring the additional accommodation into the field of availability it would be necessary in all cases to carry out full-scale conversions requiring architects' plans, planning permission, extended building operations, and so forth. I agree that a major conversion of a large property might well take a considerable time, but I am certain that an enormous amount of property which is at present under-occupied will be let almost as soon as the market is freed.
Secondly, I would say that I have paid special attention to what my hon. Friend said about the advice he has received. With great respect to his advisers, I do not agree that there will be no risk of a maximum rent limit becoming a minimum limit. I have considered the position over the country as a whole and, in my judgment, there are large areas where the market level of rents for this decontrolled property will quickly settle below a figure of two-and-a-half times the gross value. If we write into the Bill a maximum limit of two-and-a-half times the gross value, it will give everybody the idea that that is a reasonable figure—a figure which the landlord should ask and which the tenant ought to pay. In fact, in seeking to protect a certain number of tenants in the most populous parts of the country from having to pay high rents—as I fully recognise my hon. Friend is doing—he may be penalising a very much greater number of tenants in the rest of the country who, as a result of the new Clause, may have to pay higher rents.
Thirdly, in connection with the agreements which we all want to be reached between landlords and tenants, it will be much less likely that such agreements will be reached if a limit of two-and-a-half times the gross value is laid down in the Bill. It is at the landlord's discretion whether to enter into such an agreement or whether to sacrifice the benefit of the

increased rents which he might obtain and allow the tenancy to run out at the end of fifteen months, after which he can do what he likes with the property. If he judges that a limit of two-and-a-half times the gross value will be restrictive, he will not enter into any such agreement; he will decide to wait and see what happens when he is in a position to gain vacant possession of the property.
He may then decide to sell the property with vacant possession, or do what so many landlords have been doing under the iniquitous system of rent control, namely, at such time as he eventually gains vacant possession—especially in the case of flats—to put some furniture into the property and let it furnished. It should be the desire of hon. Members on both sides of the House to remove the incentive to excessive furnished lettings and unnecessary sales and, on the contrary, to try to bring back into the letting market as much unfurnished accommodation as possible.
My hon. Friend quoted cases of rents which would rise to four times the gross value. I am quite sure that in the choicest parts of the country—within the immediate vicinity of this House and in other spots where the mere locality of a dwelling gives it a luxury flavour—dwellings may be so sought after that rents will rise considerably, but I do not think for one moment that they will rise to anything like that magnitude, taking the whole country or even the whole of London.
The real protection against excessive rents is provided by the existence of competition in a free market. All the information that I have been able to gather proves to my satisfaction—and I hope that the House will accept my judgment in this matter—that a free market will be the strongest safeguard against tenants being asked to pay excessive rents.

Mr. Mitchison: It is just like a Tory Government to guillotine a Bill and then to imitate the little rivulet in Tennyson's poem that went babbling on forever so that the views of the Opposition on a matter of this sort could not be heard. I appreciate the difficulties of the Government. They have had to deal with a musical comedy mob of mutineers whose conduct has been very remarkable.
We on this side of the House do not regard this Clause as enough: we do not


regard it as perfect, but we do regard it as far better in practice and in principle than the speech which the right hon. Gentleman has just made, and we propose accordingly to divide on it. We expect the Margate mutineers to stalk, carrying their Jolly Roger, into the Lobby with us. They made enough comedy; they might for a change do something serious.
On the merits of the matter, what the right hon. Gentleman called a free market his hon. Friends described a minute or two before as chaos. It is perfectly possible in certain circumstances to have chaos in a free market. The sooner the right hon. Gentleman learns that the better. I will tell him some of the circumstances. One is a grave shortage of a commodity for which at the moment the Government are asking a free market. A large number of people whose lives are dependent on having that commodity—in this case a house—need a home to live in.
Those are people who, as everyone admits, are worried and perplexed, whose security has been destroyed by this Rent Bill. They do not know if they are going to have a house, or at what price, on what terms, or where, when the Government and their supporters have finished this precious piece of legislation. Those are the sort of conditions which turn a free market into chaos. To suppose for a moment that the real difficulties of this Bill are going to be met merely by extending fifteen months to three years and merely by the limited protection given by that is to hope for much too much.
This does at any rate indicate some sense of repentance among hon. Members of the Tory Party, with whose feelings I sympathise, particularly with their feelings when they happen to occupy marginal seats in or around London. That, of course, is the reason for this new Clause and the reason for the whole of the Margate mutiny staged with all this noise and so frequently unsuccessfully. I do not know whether we shall see them coming into the Lobby with us or not. It is going to be very amusing. I hope they will.
Even the slightest sign of repentance on the benches opposite we take note of with pleasure. We do not think it is anything more than that, but at any rate it indicates, and should indicate to the right hon. Gentleman, that his former supporters up and down the country are fed up with the legislation he now proposes. They are fed up with the anxieties which have been worrying them month after month, fed up with the prospects which this Government are inviting them to face, prospects of leaving homes which over the years they have come to consider as their own. They are fed up with the prospect of making a bargain with a landlord—the one thing which the right hon. Gentleman holds out to them—a bargain in which the landlord has the whip hand all the time and in which they cannot make any fair or equitable arrangements because, if they fail, they are going to be kicked out into the street.
That is the position into which the right hon. Gentleman and his friends are putting people all over the country. Why are they doing it? What is the real reason for it? It is not to facilitate exchanges. I do not believe it is to do what the Bill certainly will do—to transfer a very large sum of money from one group of people to another group, from the tenants to the landlords. I believe they are so stupid and so benighted that they honestly think in this year of grace that the solution of every difficulty is to be found in the free market, the free haggling between one person and another, irrespective of the advantages there may be on one side and irrespective of the hardship that might be caused on the other. I believe this ideological race downhill will end in their destruction as a party and their failure, their acknowledged failure, as a Government.
It being a quarter past Five o'clock,Mr. DEPUTY-SPEAKER proceeded, pursuant to Orders, to put forthwith the Question already proposed from the Chair.

Question put,That the Clause be read a Second time:—

The House divided:Ayes 242, Noes 267.

Division No. 81]
AYES
[5.14 p.m.


Ainsley, J. W.
Healey, Denis
Pearson, A,


Albu, A. H.
Henderson, Rt. Hn. A. (Rwty Regis)
Peart, T. F.


Allaun, Frank (Salford, E.)
Herbison, Miss M.
Pentland, N.


Allen, Arthur (Bosworh)
Hewitson, Capt. M.
Plummer, Sir Leslie


Allen, Scholefield (Crewe)
Hobson, C. R. (KeighJey)
Popplewell, E.


Awbery, S. S.
Holman, P.
Price, J. T. (Westhoughton)


Bacon, Miss Alice
Holmes, Horace
Price, Philips (Gloucestershire, W)


Baird, J.
Holt, A. F.
Probert, A. R.


Balfour, A.
Houghton, Dougals
Proctor, W. T.


Bellenger, Rt. Hon. F. J.
Howell, Charles (Perry Barr)
Pryde, D. J.


Bence, C. R. (Dumbartonshire, E.)
Howell, Dents (All Saints)
Randall, H. E.


Benn, Hn. Wedgwood (Bristol, S.E.)
Hoy, J. H.
Rankin, John


Benson, G.
Hubbard, T. F.
Redhead, E. C.


Beswick, Frank
Hughes, Cledwyn (Anglesey)
Reeves, J.


Blackburn, F.
Hughes, Emrys (S. Ayrshire)
Reid, William


Blenkinsop, A.
Hughes, Hector (Aberdeen, N.)
Robens, Rt. Hon. A.


Blyton, W. R.
Hunter, A. E.
Roberts, Albert (Normanton)


Boardman, H.
Hynd, H, (Accrington)
Roberts, Goronwy (Caernarvon)


Bowden, H, W. (Leicester, S.W.)
Hynd, J. B.(Attercliffe)
Robinson, Kenneth (St. Pancras, N)


Bowen, E. R. (Cardigan)
Irvine, A. J. (Edge Hill)
Ross, William


Bowles, F. G.
Irvine Sydney (Dartford)
Royle, C.


Boyd, T. C.
Isaacs, Rt. Hon. G. A.
Shinwell, Rt. Hon. E.


Braddock, Mrs. Elizabeth
Janner, B.
Short, E. W.


Brockway, A. F.
Jay, Rt. Hon. D. P. T.
Shurmer, P. L. E.


Broughton, Dr. A. D. D.
Jeger, George (Goole)
Silverman, Julius (Aston)


Brown, Thomas (Ince)
Jeger, Mrs. Lena(Holbn &amp; St.Pncs,S.)
Silverman, Sydney (Nelson)


Burke, W. A.
Jenkins, Roy (Stechford)
Simmons, C. J. (Brierley Hill)


Burton, Miss F. E.
Johnston, Douglas (Paisley)
Skeffington, A. M.


Butler, Herbert (Hackney, C.)
Jones, David (The Hartlepools)
Slater, Mrs. H. (Stoke, N.)


Butler, Mrs. Joyce (Wood Green)
Jones, J. Idwal (Wrexham)
Slater, J. (Sedgefield)


Callaghan, L. J.
Jones, T. W. (Merloneth)
Smith, Ellis (Stoke, S.)


Carmichael, J.
Key, Rt. Hon. C. W.
Sorensen, R. W.


Champion, A, J.
King, Dr. H. M.
Sparks, J. A.


Chapman, W. D.
Lawson, G. M.
Steele, T.


Chetwynd, G. R.
Ledger, R. J.
Stewart, Michael (Fulham)


Coldrick, W
Lee, Frederick (Newton)
Stonehouse, J. T.


Collick, P. H. (Birkenhead)
Lee, Miss Jennie (Cannock)
Stones, W. (Consett)


Collins, V. J.(Shoreditch&amp;Finsbury)
Lever, Leslie (Ardwick)
Strachey, Rt. Hon. J.


Corbet, Mrs. Freda
Lewis, Arthur
Strauss, Rt. Hon. Geore (Vauxhall)


Cove, W. G.
Lindgren, G. S.
Summerskill, Rt, Hon. E.


Craddock, George (Bradford, S.)
Lipton, Marcus
Swingler, S. T.


Cronin, J. D.
MacDermot, Niall
Sylvester, G. O.


Crossman, R. H. S.
McGhee, H. G.
Taylor, Bernard (Mansfield)


Cullen, Mrs. A.
McGovern, J.
Thomas, George (Cardiff)


Dalton Rt. Hon. H.
McInnes, J.
Thomas, Iorwerth (Rhondda, W.)


Dnavies, Ernest (Enfield, E.)
McKay, John (Wallsend)
Thomson, George (Dundee, E.)


Davies. Harold (Leek)
MacMillan, M. K. (Western Isles)
Thornton, E.


Davies, Stephen (Merthyr)
MacPherson, Malcolm (Stirling)
Timmons, J.


Deer, G.
Mahon, Simon
Tomney, F.


de Freitas, Geoffrey
Mainwarlng, W. H.
Ungoed-Thomas, Sir Lynn


Delargy, H. J.
Mallalieu, E. L. (Brigg)
Usborne, H. C.


Dodds, N. N.
Mallalieu, J. P. W. (Huddersfd, E.)
Viant, S. P.


Donnelly, D. L.
Mann, Mrs. Jean
Wade, D. W.


Dugdale, Rt. Hn. John (W. Brmwch)
Marquand, Rt. Hon. H. A.
Warbey, W. N.


Dye, S.
Mason, Roy
Watkins, T. E.


Ede, Rt. Hon. J. C.
Mayhew, C. P.
Weitzman, D.


Edelman, M.
Mellish, R. J.
Wells, Percy (Faversham)


Edwards, Rt. Hon. John (Brighouse)
Messer, Sir F.
Wells, William (Walsall, N.)


Edwards, Rt. Hon. Ness (Caerphilly)
Mikardo, Ian
West, D. G.


Edwards, Robert (Bilston)
Mitchison, G. R.
Wheeldon, W. E.


Edwards, W. J. (Stepney)
Monslow, W.
White, Mrs. Eirene (E. Flint)


Evans, Albert (Islington, S.W.)
Moody, A. S.
White, Henry (Derbyshire, N.E.)


Fernyhough, E.
Morris. Percy (Swansea, W.)
Wigg, George


Fienburgh, W.
Morrison, Rt. Hn. Herbert(Lewis'm, S.)
Wilcock, Group Capt C. A. B.


Finch, H. J.
Moss, R.
Wilkins, W. A.


Fletcher, Eric
Moyle, A.
Willey, Frederick


Forman, J. C.
Mulley, F. W.
Williams, David (Neath)


Gaitskell, Rt. Hon. H. T. N.
Neal, Harold (Bolsover)
Williams, Rev. Llywelyn (Ab'tillery)


Gibson, C. W.
Noel-Baker, Rt. Hon. P. (Derby, S.)
Williams, Ronald (Wigan)


Gooch, E. G.
Oliver, G. H.
Williams, Rt. Hon. T. (Don Valley)


Gordon Walker, Rt. Hon. P. C.
Orbach, M.
Williams, W. R. (Openshaw)


Greenwood, Anthony
Oswald, T.
Williams W. T. (Barons Court)


Grenfell, Rt. Hon. D. R.
Owen, W. J.
Willis, Eustace (Edinburgh, E.)


Grey, C. F.
Padley, W. E.
Wilson, Rt. Hon. Harold (Huyton)


Griffiths, Rt. Hon. James (Llanelly)
Paget, R. T.
Woof, R. E.


Grimond, J.
Paling, Rt. Hon. W. (Dearne Valley)
Yates, V. (Ladywood)


Hall, Rt. Hn. Glenvil (Colne Valley)
Palmer, A. M. F.
Younger, Rt. Hon. K.


Hamilton, W. W.
Pannell, Charles (Leeds, W.)
Zilliacus, K.


Hannan, W.
Pargiter, G. A.



Harrison, J. (Nottingham, N.)
Parker, J.
TELLERS FOR THE AYES:


Hastings, S.
Parkin, B. T.
Mr. John Taylor and


Hayman, F. H.
Paton, John
Mr, G. H. R. Rogers.







NOES


Agnew, Sir Peter
George, J. C. (Pollok)
Macmillan, Maurice (Halifax)


Aitken, W. T.
Gibson-Watt, D.
Macpherson, Niall (Dumfries)


Allan, R. A. (Paddington, S.)
Godber, J. B.
Maddan, Martin


Alport, C. J. M.
Gomme-Duncan, Col. Sir Alan
Maitland, Cdr. J. F. W. (Horncastle)


Amory, Rt. Hn. Heathcoat(Tiverton)
Goodhart, P. C.
Maitiand, Hon. Patrick (Lanark)


Anstruther-Gray, Major Sir William
Gough, C. F. H.
Marshall, Douglas


Arbuthnot, John
Gower, H. R.
Mathew, R.


Armstrong, C, W,
Graham, Sir Fergus
Maude, Angus


Ashton, H.
Green A.
Maudling, Rt. Hon. R.


Astor, Hon. J. J.
Grimston, Hon. John (St. Albans)
Mawby, R. L.


Atkins, H. E.
Grimston, Sir Robert (Westbury)
Maydon, Lt.-Comdr. S. L. C.


Baldock, Lt.-Cmdr. J. M.
Grosvenor, Lt.-Col. R. G.
Medlicott, Sir Frank


Baldwin, A. E.
Gurden, Harold
Milligan, Rt. Hon. W. R.


Balniel, Lord
Hall, John (Wycombe)
Moore, Sir Thomas


Barber, Anthony
Harris, Frederic (Croydon, N.W.)
Morrison, John (Salisbury)


Barter, John
Harmon, A. B. C. (Maldon)
Mott-Radclyffe, Sir Charles


Baxter, Sir Beverley
Harrison, Col. J. H. (Eye)
Nabarro, G. D. N.


Beamish, Maj. Tufton
Harvey, Air Cdre. A. V. (Maeclesfd)
Nairn, D. L. S.


Bell, Ronald (Bucks, S.)
Harvey, Ian (Harrow, E.)
Neave, Airey


Bennett, F. M. (Torquay)
Harvey, John (Walthamstow, E.)
Nicholls, Harmar


Bennett, Dr. Reginald
Harvie-Watt, Sir George
Nicholson, Godfrey (Farnham)


Bevins, J. R. (Toxteth)
Hay, John
Nlcolson, N. (B'n'm'th, E. &amp; Chr'ch)


Bidgood, J. C.
Heald, Rt. Hon. Sir Lionel
Nugent, G. R. H.


Biggs-Davison, J. A.
Heath, Rt. Hon. E. R. G.
Oakshott, H. D.


Birch, Rt. Hon. Nigel
Henderson, John (Cathcart)
O'Neill, Hn. Phelim (Co. Antrim,N.)


Bishop, F. P.
Hesketh, R. F.
Ormsby-Gore, Rt. Hon. W. D.


Black, C. W.
Hicks-Beach, Maj. W. W.
Orr, Capt. L. P. S.


Body, R. F.
Hill, Rt. Hon. Charles (Luton)
Orr-Ewing, Charles Ian (Hendon, N.)


Boothby, Sir Robert
Hill, John (S. Norfolk)
Orr-Ewing, Sir Ian (Weston-S-Mare)


Bossom, Sir Alfred
Hlnchingbrooke, Viscount
Osborne, C.


Boyd-Carpenter, Rt. Hon. J. A.
Hobson, J. G. S.(War'ck &amp; Leam'gtn)
Page, R. G.


Boyle, Sir Edward
Holland-Martin, C. J.
Pannell, N. A. (Kirkdale)


Braine, B. R.
Hope, Lord John
Partridge, E.


Braithwaite, Sir Albert (Harrow, W.)
Hornby, R. P.
Peyton, J. W. W.


Bromley-Davenport, Lt.-Col. W. H.
Horntsby-Smith, Miss M. P.
Pickthorn, K. W. M.


Brooke, Rt. Hon. Henry
Horobin, Sir Ian
Pike, Miss Mervyn


Brooman-White, R. C.
Horsbrugh, Rt. Hon. Dame Florence
Pilkington, Capt R. A.


Browne, J Nixon (Craigton)
Howard, Hon. Greville (St. Ivel)
Pitman, I. J.


Bryan, P.
Howard, John (Test)
Pitt, Miss E. M.


Bullus, Wing Commander E. E.
Hughes Hallett, Vice-Admlral J.
Pott, H. P.


Butcher, Sir Herbert
Hughes-Young, M. H. C.
Powell, J. Enoch


Butler, Rt. Hn.R. A.(Saffron Walden)
Hulbert, Sir Norman
Price, Henry (Lewisham, W.)


Campbell, Sir David
Hutchison, Sir Ian Clark (E'b'gh, W.)
P[...]rior-Palmer, Brig. O. L.


Carr, Robert
Hutchison, Sir James (Sootstoun)
Raikes, Sir Victor


Cary, Sir Robert
Hyde, Montgomery
Ramsden, J. E.


Channon, Sir Henry
Hylton-Foster, Rt. Hon. Sir Harry
Rawlinson, Peter


Chlchester-Clark, R.
Iremonger, T. L.
Redmayne, M.


Conant, Maj. Sir Roger 
Irvine, Bryant Godman (Rye)
Remnant, Hon. P.


Cooke, Robert
Jennings, J. C. (Burton)
Renton, D. L. M.


Cooper, A. E.
Johnson, Dr. Donald (Carlisle)
Ridsdale, J. E.


Cooper-Key, E. M.
Johnson, Eric (Blackley)
Rippon, A. G. F.


Corfield, Capt. F. V.
Johnson, Howard (Kemptown)
Robertson, Sir David


Craddock, Beresford (Spelthorne)
Joseph, Sir Keith
Robson-Brown, W.


Crouch, R. F.
Joynson-Hicks, Hon. Sir Lanceiot
Rodgers, John (Sevenoaks)


Crowder, Sir John (Flnchley)
Keegan, D.
Roper, Sir Harold


Cunningham, Knox
Kerby, Capt. H. B.
Ropner, Col. Sir Leonard


Currle, G. B. H.
Kerr, H. W.
Russell, R. S.


Dance, J. C. G.
Kershaw, J. A.
Sandys, Rt. Hon. D.


Davidson, Viscountess
Kimball, M.
Schofield, Lt.-Col. W.


Deedes, W. F.
Kirk, P. M.
Scott-Miller, Cmdr. R.


Digby, Simon Wingfield
Lambert, Hon. G.
Sharpies, R. C.


Doughty, C. J. A.
Lancaster, Col. C. G.
Shepherd, William


Drayson, G. B.
Langford-Holt, J. A.
Smithers, Peter (Winchester)


du Cann, E. D. L.
Leavey, J. A.
Smyth, Brig, Sir John (Norwood)


Dugdale, Rt. Hn. Sir T. (Richmond)
Leburn, W. G.
Soames, Christopher


Duncan, Capt. J. A. L.
Legge-Bourke, Maj. E. A. H.
Spearman, Sir Alexander


Duthie, W. S.
Lindsay, Hon. James (Devon, N.)
Speir, R. M.


Eden, J. B. (Bournemouth, West)
Linstead, Sir H. N.
Spence, H. R. (Aberdeen, W.)


Elliott, R. W.
Llewellyn, D. T.
Spens, Rt. Hn. Sir P. (Kens'g'tn, S.)


Emmet, Hon Mrs. Evelyn
Lloyd, Maj. Sir Guy (Renfrew, E.)
Stanley, Capt. Hon. Richard


Erroll, F. J.
Longden, Gilbert
Stevens, Geoffrey


Farey-Jones, F. W.
Low, Rt. Hon. A. R. W,
Steward, Harold (Stockport, S.)


Fell, A.
Lucas, Sir Jocelyn (Portsmouth, S.)
Steward, Sir William (Woolwich, W.)


Finlay, Graeme
Lucas, P. B. (Brentford &amp; Chlswick)
Stewart, Sir James Henderson (Fife,E.)


Fisher, Nigel
Lucas-Tooth, Sir Hugh
Stoddart-Scott, Col. M.


Fletcher-Cooke, C.
Macdonald, Sir Peter
Storey, S.


Fort, R.
Mackeson, Brig. Sir Harry
Stuart, Rt. Hon. James (Moray)


Fraser, Sir Ian (M'cmbe &amp; Lonsdale)
Mackie, J. H. (Galloway)
Studholme, Sir Henry


Freeth, Denzil
McLaughlin, Mrs. P.
Summers, Sir Spencer


Galbraith, Hon. T. G. D.
McLean, Neil (Inverness)
Taylor, Sir Charles (Eastbourne)


Garner-Evans, E. H.
MacLeod, John (Ross &amp; Cromarty)
Temple, J. M.







Thomas, Leslie (Canterbury)
Vane, W. M. F.
Whitelaw, W.S.I.(Penrith &amp; Border)


Thomas, P. J. M. (Conway)
Vaughan-Morgan, J. K.
Williams, Paul (Sunderland, S.)


Thompson, Kenneth (Walton)
Vickers, Miss Joan
Williams, R. Dudley (Exeter)


Thompson, Lt.-Cdr. R.(Croydon, S.)
Wakefield, Edward (Derbyshire, W.)
Wilson, Geoffrey (Truro)


Thornton-Kemsley, C. N.
Walker-Smith, Rt. Hon. D. C.
Wood, Hon. R.


Tiley, A. (Bradford, W.)
Ward, Rt. Hon. G. R. (Worcester)
Yates, William (The Wrekin)


Turner, H. F. L.
Waterhouse, Capt. Rt. Hon. C.



Turton, Rt. Hon. R. H.
Watkinson, Rt. Hon. Harold
TELLERS FOR THE NOES:


Tweedsmuir, Lady
Webbe, Sir H.
Mr Wills and Mr. Legh.

Clause 1.—(RENT LIMIT OF CONTROLLED HOUSES.)

Mr. Bevins: I beg to move, in page 2, line 1, to leave cut "or shared accommodation".
This is a very simple Amendment which I can put briefly to the House. As the Clause was originally drafted, the rent of a controlled dwelling might be the equivalent of twice the gross value, or whatever the appropriate multiplier might be, together with an addition for the value of shared accommodation—that is, accommodation shared either with the landlord or with another tenant. When the Bill was first produced, it was not clear whether the hypothetical rent of such a tenancy, on which the gross value is based, would reflect the value of the shared accommodation, but it has now been clearly established from the Inland Revenue that the value of shared accommodation would he reflected in the gross value for rating purposes. This Amendment will protect tenants in circumstances such as I have described from, in effect, having to pay for shared accommodation twice over.

Mr. Mitchison: That seems reasonable.

Amendment agreed to.

Mr. Bevins: I beg to move, in page 2, line 4, to leave out "mentioned in the forgoing subsection" and to insert:
 on the rent recoverable under a controlled tenancy for any rental period.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker (Sir Charles MacAndrew): This Amendment and the two Amendments in line 13 should be taken together. I shall not call the second Amendment for a Division.

Mr. Bevins: This Amendment is also a reasonable proposition, although, perhaps, less simple than that which I last moved. Subsection (3) of the Clause says, in substance, that where the present rent exceeds the rent limit fixed under subsection (1), then the rent shall be the rent current at the commencement of the Act as distinct from the rent limit provided for in subsection (1). To read that

as meaning the rent limit set out in subsection (1) would render subsection (3) meaningless. I am advised that no court of law would construe it in that way. It is the case that there has been a good deal of heart-searching on both sides of the House as to exactly what was meant by this provision and whether it was expressed in the right way. My right hon. Friend has two Amendments on the Order Paper—this and an Amendment in line 13—which remove all possible ambiguities.
The end of subsection (3) will read, allowing for these Amendments,
 the rent limit shall be the rent recoverable as aforesaid subject however to the provisions of the foregoing subsection.
The words "as aforesaid" clearly refer to what goes before in subsection (3); that is to say, to
…the rent recoverable for the basic rental period…
The word "foregoing" clearly refers back to subsection (2). I appreciate that my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (Mr. Hay), and perhaps one or two other hon. Members, are not entirely happy with the wording as it was—or even, maybe, as it is now proposed—but my right hon. Friend has been into this on more than one occasion—indeed, during the last twelve hours—and I am assured that the wording as now presented does convey what we mean to say.

5.30 p.m.

Mr. Hay: I have listened with great care to what my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary has said. It is perfectly true that subsection (3) contains a tremendous ambiguity and that even at this late stage something has to be done to try to put it right. My difficulty is that I cannot altogether see that the two Amendments in his name do that. As I read it, the first one would only alter the statement that the rent limit is to be subjected to adjustment from time to time under Clauses 3 and 5 of the Bill. The ambiguity arises in subsection (3), where it says that where under a controlled tenancy which is current at the


commencement of the Act the present rent recoverable is greater than what would be the rent limit if one ascertained it under the new provisions of subsection (1),
…the rent limit shall be the rent recoverable as aforesaid, …
It has been pointed out in a number of quarters, that "as aforesaid" might refer back either to the words in line 10—
…the rent recoverable for the basic rental period….
or to line 11—
…the rent limit for that period if ascertained under subsection (1) ….
I see the hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for Kettering (Mr. Mitchison) shaking his head, but I put this forward because I think there is that ambiguity and that it should be cleared up. I do not think there could be any more simple way of clearing it up than by accepting this Amendment to leave out the words "as aforesaid", and to insert
for the basic rental period.
It would then read:
Where under a controlled tenancy current at the commencement of this Act the rent recoverable for the basic rental period exceeds what would be the rent limit for that period if ascertained under subsection (1) of this section, the rent limit shall be the rent recoverable for the basic rental period, but subject to adjustment and reduction…
and so on.
I think that that would clear it up beyond a peradventure, but I am a tyro in these matters, and my right hon. Friend is advised by those who know all about drafting, as we have often learned to our cost here in the past. Therefore, although I do not press my Amendment, I ask my right hon. Friend to look at the matter very closely in order to make sure that no one will be misled or, more particularly, forced to go to court and incur the expense of litigation. I hope that, unless he is quite satisfied on that point, he will take steps to clear it up.

Mr. Mitchison: We objected to this subsection at some length in Committee. We divided on it. We still object to it, but these seem to be drafting Amendments intended to make the meaning of the Government clearer. We do not feel it appropriate or, indeed, in order to enter into a discussion on the merits of the subsection in our discussion of these Amendments. Honestly, as between the

various draftsmen, we would rather they fought it out behind the scenes than to take time when there is a Guillotine.

Amendment agreed to.

Further Amendment made:In page 2, line 13, leave out from "aforesaid" to "the" in line 14 and insert:
 subject however to the provisions of ".—[Mr. Bevins.]

Mr. A. Blenkinsop: I beg to move, in page 2, line 19, at the end to insert:
(5) This section shall not apply to any dwelling-house in relation to which an application under section one of the Act of 1949 either—

(a)has been made since the Housing Rents and Repairs Act, 1954, came into force and before this Act comes into force, or
(b)can be made on or after the date on which this Act comes into force.
(6) The rent recoverable in respect of such a dwelling-house as is mentioned in the last foregoing subsection for the rental period comprising the commencement of this Act shall, notwithstanding the repeals effected by this Act, remain the rent recoverable in respect of that dwelling-house for any rental period for which it is neither increased nor reduced by the determination of a Tribunal under the Act of 1949.
(7) The proviso to section one of the Act of 1949 (which provides that an application to determine a reasonable rent for a dwelling-house shall not be made if a previous such application has been made in respect of that dwelling-house) shall no longer have effect and references in the Act of 1949 to a standard rent shall be construed as references to the standard rent on the day before the commencement of this Act.
I think it would be for the convenience of the Committee if, at the same time, we were to take four consequential Amendments. Those consequential Amendments are: in page 14, line 44, after "1939", to insert "The Act of 1949"; in page 16, line 8, at the end to insert:
Tribunal" has the same meaning as it has for the purposes of section one of the Act of 1949,
in page 31, line 47, at the end to insert:
25. Sections five and six of the Act of 1949 (which relate respectively to registers of determinations and to tribunals for the purposes of section one of that Act) shall apply for the purposes of this Act as they apply for the purposes of section one of that Act,
and in page 38, line 17, to leave out "Sections one, four, five and six".
This Amendment has a rather strange history. The matter was raised in Committee, and although in Committee we


were subjected to the Guillotine during the major part of the proceedings, we were, at this time, subject only to the trickery of the Government. It was the predecessors of the present Minister and the present Parliamentary Secretary who so organised business as to deny any reply on this at that time.
What happened was that the hon. Member for Oldham, East (Sir I. Horobin) was in the midst of one of his, if I may say so, more brilliant sentences, when he was interrupted by the closure of one sitting. When the Committee again met in order to hear the completion of that sentence, to our surprise neither was the hon. Member allowed to complete his sentence—as I am sure he was eager to do—nor did the Minister or the Parliamentary Secretary rise to make any comment. In fact, they took a snap Division, thus denying the Committee any sort of consideration of this proposal at all. That, of course, is why we are. considering the matter again today.
The Bill has the effect of sweeping away a large part of the rent tribunal procedure, and this Amendment seeks to restore, to some extent, that procedure, which has been found to be of such great value to the large mass of tenants up and down the country. It is true that this Amendment refers only to the rent tribunal procedure provided in Section 1 of the 1949 Act, but that is a very considerable amount. I was looking at the last available report of the Ministry, which shows the large volume of work which is being done under Section 1 of the 1949 Act by the tribunals. Unless this Amendment is passed, that will be swept away.
For example, I noticed that during 1955 there was a sharp increase in the tribunals' work—very naturally, because the party opposite extended their field of operation by the 1954 Act. That Act enabled approaches to be made by both parties. That, indeed, was the case before, but what was new was that it enabled the rent tribunals to agree an increase of rent as well as a reduction where they thought it suitable. Very naturally, that resulted in a large number of further applications being made to them by landlords in addition, of course, to the still very considerable number of applications by tenants.
I notice that the right hon. Gentleman who treated us so scurvily in Committee is now sitting on the Front Bench. I am very grateful to him for coming to consider this matter and, perhaps, even to let us have his views of this question which, as I was explaining to the House, he refused to let us have when we were dealing with the matter in Committee. It will be very interesting to hear the views of the Minister of Defence in addition to the views of the right hon. Gentleman who has succeeded him as Minister of Housing and Local Government.
There was in 1955 a rapid increase in the number of cases under the Landlord and Tenant (Rent Control) Act, 1949. In fact, the number of cases received during the year was over 4,000 for 1955, compared with 2,500 the year before. There is no doubt that these rent tribunals are being used to a very large extent and are proving of great importance. But, of course, that does not concern the Minister. He wishes to sweep them away, and by these provisions we are now considering he has swept away a good half of the work of the rent tribunals. That is a very serious matter indeed.
Why cannot the Minister accept the very modest proposals which are made in this Amendment? It proposes, in effect, that in the case of all new lettings since 1939, the date provided for in the 1949 Act, the question of rental should go before the rent tribunal if either tenant or landlord so wishes. I would stress that, under the present law, it is possible for the rent to be either increased or reduced. There can be no suggestion of unfairness here. It is the responsibility of the rent tribunals to settle what they regard as the reasonable rent, and it has, moreover, been the common view up and down the country that these tribunals have done an exceedingly good and useful job.
In what I might almost call excessive fairness, we make the further proposal that the proviso in the 1949 Act which said that a second application could not be made to a rent tribunal should, in effect, be deleted. This means that second applications can be made. One would have thought that that would have been an advantage, even in some cases to landlords as well as to tenants. It is making the position open to take account of changing circumstances. It seems to me


that it is a perfectly valid, fair and reasonable proposal to advance, that tenants, instead of being denied their rights of independent arbitration by a rent tribunal, should have those rights preserved really as they are at present.
When this matter came before the Committee—I put it in that way, since we were denied any opportunity to discuss it—my hon. and learned Friend rightly urged upon the Committee that here was the case where tribunals are required to determine a reasonable rent, yet the Government were saying that any such determination of reasonable rent is to be set aside. That, in effect, is the situation. I must confess that I am no clearer in mind after the Parliamentary Secretary tries to explain it than I am before he starts, but, as I read the Bill, I understand the position to be this. Where, in advance of the Bill coming into operation, a rental has been determined which is higher than the rent limit set by the Bill, then that higher rent has to operate. If, on the other hand, a rental is determined, either by a tribunal or by agreement, which is below the rent limit fixed by the Bill, then the rent limit fixed by the Bill shall operate. The result is that the landlord is to have it either way, which is surely quite the most outrageous travesty of justice.
5.45 p.m.
I can well understand the Minister or his Parliamentary Secretary making out a case that, where determinations have been made long years ago, some alteration has to take place. But, after all, we are here discussing determinations made by rent tribunals in some cases as recently as a few months ago, or just a few years ago—anyhow, since the war and the development of this procedure. No one can possibly say that those determinations are out of date. Even if they were, there is procedure under our Amendment enabling them to be reconsidered by the tribunal.
All of us are surely agreed that the procedure of the tribunal is a simple one which does give to the average tenant a feeling of justice which he certainly does not expect to get in any other way. As all my hon. and right hon. Friends have made clear, the average tenant does not like being taken or taking anybody else to the courts. He is not in the habit of

doing that. He is frightened of the procedure. Whereas, on the whole, the procedure of the rent tribunals is informal, simple, and, therefore, highly desirable.
The hon. Gentleman the Member for Oldham, East will, I am sure, give us his support, because he has said, in relation to an earlier Amendment about which he was speaking to the House a moment or two ago, that he very much preferred civil procedure, by which I understood him to mean that he liked to see cases of this kind dealt with in this more informal manner rather than by trying to take them through the courts. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that he will support us, and all the more, because he was so brutally stopped from speaking what was on his mind when the matter was considered in Committee. I feel sure that we have the welcome support of Members opposite.
Irrespective of the views of the hon. Member for Oldham, East, I would say that if this Amendment be not accepted by the Government, then a quite impossible situation will be created; the Government will be denying to people in the country the assurance of, by definition, a reasonable rent determined by an independent body, namely, the tribunals which have had the approval of people of all political persuasions up and down the country. We fear that there is in the mind of the Government an intention to destroy this kind of procedure, but any such act on their part will merely serve to drive deeper into the minds of people in the country the feeling that what hon. and right hon. Gentlemen opposite are after is not any kind of fair play for tenants but merely a determination to ride roughshod over their views and ensure the supremacy of the landlords' claim for a higher rent, whether it be just or not.

Mr. Janner: I beg to second the Amendment.
It is a matter about which both sides of the House must surely agree that there can be no reasonable answer. The case is perfectly clear. When we were discussing the 1949 Act, it was plain that there was a flaw in it in respect of rentals charged for the first time after the war. It is not always that the House comes to a right conclusion, but there is not the slightest doubt that on that occasion it came to the only conclusion which


can be considered reasonable, namely, that a body of independent people should make up its mind, taking everything into consideration, whether a rent is a reasonable one or not.
The procedure, which is known to sonic—probably all—of us, is that the tribunal sends out a notice, asks for particulars of the property concerned. gets every single detail, makes an appointment in most cases to see the property, knows the locality, knows what the rentals ought to be and judges from every angle, taking all the facts into consideration, not what the rent should be, but what the reasonable rent should be.
I cannot believe that the Minister will say that he wants to ask for an unreasonable rent. That would be absurd. He is trying to convince us that the Bill is reasonable and that the rentals which subsequently will become payable will be reasonable. He says that the law of supply and demand and of everything else will operate and everything will be fine, but the fact is that he is not certain yet.
The Minister is taking a tremendous risk. As some of his hon. Friends have said, it is not a certainty by any means. The Ridley Committee, for example, said that properties should not be decontrolled until we were sure that there was a reasonable possibility of other accommodation being available. That is the kind of circumstance which would be taken into consideration by the tribunal. Consequently, when the tribunals come to the conclusion that a rental is reasonable, there is no question of anyone curbing them within certain limits. All that they have to do is to decide whether the rent in all the circumstances is reasonable.
Can the Minister honestly say that there is not a sinister motive behind the whole of the Bill if he is not prepared to accept a proposal to allow the functioning of these independent tribunals, comprising people who are not curbed in any way and who deal with these matters without any question of party? Hon. Members know that the tribunals, from their own knowledge, judge what is a reasonable rent and what is not, and not what is to be the standard rent or the recoverable rent according to rules which have been laid down by people who may not understand all the circumstances.
If the Minister refuses our request, the country will realise the truth of what we

have been saying, that the Bill is nothing but a racket to try to obtain, when accommodation is not available, exorbitant, unreasonable rentals at the expense of tenants who can ill afford to pay them and who will be placed in such desperate plight that they will pay whatever rent is demanded of them, reasonable or unreasonable, and mainly unreasonable.
I ask the Minister to take these points into consideration and not to allow himself, in spite of pressure that might come from behind him, to do something which is unreasonable, as he would be doing if he did not insist upon the payment of a reasonable rent but allowed unreasonable rentals to be demanded.

Mr. Albert Evans: I am sure that the Minister, at least in his moments of reflection, would he relieved if he could know that the rents of properties would in future be fixed upon a reasonable basis. Some of the nightmares that he must now he enduring from the possibility of unreasonable rents being demanded when the Bill is in operation would be avoided if he could so arrange his Bill that rents were fixed upon a reasonable basis.
Our Amendment suggests a way by which the rent of the type of property that we are considering should be fixed upon a reasonable basis by an impartial tribunal of specialists. One would have thought that the Minister would be ready to accept it if only to cover this small category of properties. The Amendment applies only to those houses which have been let for the first time since the operation of the 1954 Act. It goes hack no further than that. Therefore, the rents which have been fixed for those properties for the first time were fixed impartially by the tribunals, which had power to raise or lower the rents as they thought reasonable.
The Amendment applies also to houses which are let for the first time in the future. There will be difficulties about houses of that type when they become empty and pass out of control and are let for the first time under the new basis. One would have thought that the Minister would be happy that the rents of those houses could be determined by an impartial tribunal, and I hope that he will see the sense of the Amendment.
I suppose that some 8,000 or 9,000 houses have already been dealt with in


this manner since the 1954 Act came into operation. My hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, East (Mr. Blenkinsop) spoke of some 4,000 of them in 1955, and it is a fair assumption that another 4,000 or so were dealt with in 1956. We are dealing, therefore, with roughly 8,000 houses, the rents of which have been fixed by the tribunals over those two years, and we are dealing with the houses which will be let for the first time in the future. In dealing with this small category of houses, the Minister has the opportunity——

Mr. Mitchison: May I point out to my hon. Friend that the Amendment relates to any house which has been first let after the outbreak of war? That is to say, it will cover much more than he has in mind, although it will, of course, include those he has mentioned.

Mr. Evans: The Amendment relates to an application which has been made to the tribunal
since the Housing Rents and Repairs Act, 1954, came into force…

Mr. Mitchison: Will my hon. Friend read the next paragraph?

Mr. Evans: It seems to me to apply to first lettings in the future. It is fair to say that the Amendment would not extend back to those houses which were let at the time when the tribunals could only reduce rents and not increase them. I should have thought it would be fair if it were restricted to houses let after the operation of the 1954 Act, because prior to that time the tribunals could not increase rents but could only lower them, and could not assess upon a fair basis.
However that may be, I hope that the Minister will avail himself of the Amendment and so allow the rents of this comparatively small category of houses to be assessed on a fair basis. I hope he will consider the matter in that light and will agree that the Amendment provides a method of getting the rents of these houses fixed on a reasonable basis by an informal tribunal.

Mr. Mitchison: The Amendment relates to a very large body of houses the standard rent of which, for the purposes of the Rent Acts, was fixed by a letting after the outbreak of war. It therefore relates to all houses which were first let as the result of moves during the war—

and there were a great many such moves —when owner-occupiers, for reasons of work or service, let their houses for the first time. It also relates to all houses built during—there were not many—or since the war. It therefore covers a very large body of houses indeed.
6.0 p.m.
The right hon. Gentleman's predecessor, when asked how many houses were covered, replied that he did not know. We must take it, therefore, that the Ministry, as occasionally happens, does not know how many houses it is talking about or what proportion they form of the whole. I am sure it would be agreed at once that it is a considerable proportion. The object of the Amendment is to take the machinery started by Section 1 of the 1949 Act for determining a reasonable rent, and determining it before a tribunal, and using that machinery for determining the reasonable rent of these houses.
It is quite true that the machinery was started by the 1949 Act, but it was limited at that time to fixing a reasonable rent lower than the standard rent. And it was the Tory Government and the right hon. Gentleman's predecessor who, by the 1954 Act, gave the tribunals power to fix a rent higher than a reasonable rent if they so wished. The consequence is that at the moment, in relation to this large body of houses, the tribunals have the right to fix a reasonable rent, and, though there is some guidance in the Act as to what is a reasonable rent, there is even more guidance to be extracted from the rules, which the tribunals have evolved in dealing with a large number of cases, and which occur to some extent in reported cases concerning these determinations. I will not trouble the House about that, but it can be taken that "reasonable rent" is not entirely a hit-and-miss matter. There are some rules about it.
The House can also take it that a reasonable rent does not necessarily mean a free market rent because, as has been said about these cases, the object of giving this power to fix a reasonable rent was to avoid the unreasonableness of free market conditions. What is a reasonable rent will no doubt differ in different cases, having regard, among other things, to the position of the landlord. I say that to reassure hon. Members opposite. These tribunals are not


bodies just for fixing what they think is right for the tenant to pay. They are concerned with both sides of the question, and, naturally, they will fix a reasonable rent having regard to these matters. It will be a different rent in different parts of the country. It may be a different rent in different parts of London and it may be different in the provinces, and so on.
The Bill fixes a rent by reference to gross rateable value. That is in one sense a pretty rigid test, because, if it is assumed that the gross rateable value is rightly assessed, then in each case the rent limit would be in relation to that rigid figure. It will be a multiple, according to the position about repairs, of the gross rateable value of the house. The tribunal goes beyond that.
I put it to the House with real earnestness—and I hope that it will be considered fairly and with due regard to the fact that we are dealing with human beings—that that limit cannot always be right. Indeed, it will be an accident of it fits in with the personal circumstances of different cases. By means of the Amendment we are asking why the Government should abolish the machinery which the Tory Government themselves in 1954 invited and empowered to deal with the whole question of reasonable rents. This is machinery which has been used again and again, and, broadly speaking, to an increasing extent during recent years, though there have been fluctuations between one year and another.
The answer sometimes made to this, and to similar questions about county courts, is, "We should give them too much to do." In this instance the remedy lies in the Minister's own hands. He has power to appoint more tribunals if it is necessary to do so, and although many people complain if they do not have a high-powered judge sitting every time on a tribunal, why should we, in a matter of this sort, compel people to travel in the Rolls Royce of judicial decisions when they would much prefer to go along in the old "tin Lizzie" of tribunals, if, with respect to tribunals, I can use that analogy. What is wanted is not consistency, but the human element, which tribunals have tried successfully to introduce, and regard to the all-important fact that people, and tenants in particular, are

frightened to go to courts, but are not, on the whole, frightened of tribunals.
If we look for a logical reason, and it is not wholly a logical affair. the answer is that the tribunals are much less formal and that they cost much less, though my feeling about legal costs always is that, whatever we may say about them, the apprehensions about them are very often worse than the costs themselves. Surely, in a matter of this sort we do not want to debar people from using this tribunal machinery. We do not want to tie them down to the rigid rule of an Act of Parliament.
We have heard singularly little from the right hon. Gentleman or his predecessor about the reason why they are abolishing this rent tribunal jurisdiction. We are driven to the conclusion, against our own wishes, that when it is a question of looking after the landlords' rights in property the Government on the whole prefer the unreasonable to the reasonable, provided that it is better for the landlord. We do not want to think that, and I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will reassure us by leaving the tribunals to do their job and by leaving the question of a reasonable rent for this large body of houses to be determined by those who have done the job pretty well in the past and. I repeat, have done it at the instance of the right hon. Gentleman's own Government.

Mr. Brooke: I had not the honour of being a Member of Standing Committee A on 18th December, more than three months ago, when the Committee reached a decision on a similar Amendment. Therefore, I am not in a position to say why it was that no Opposition spokesman other than the hon. and learned Member for Kettering (Mr. Mitchison) spoke to the Amendment in order to force a reply from the Government before the Division was taken. It may have been, of course, that the Opposition was anxious to avoid what happened today, that is, duplicate and differing interpretations from different hon. Members of what their own Amendment means. As against the hon. Member for Islington, South-East (Mr. A. Evans), I entirely agree with the hon. and learned Member for Kettering about the meaning of the Opposition Amendment.

Mr. Mitchison: I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for that, but I want


to reassure him about our motives. We passionately wanted to hear the. end of the sentence which the hon. Member for Oldham, East (Sir I. Horobin) had begun in Standing Committee. We have not heard it yet.

Sir Ian Horobin: The hon. and learned Member would be surprised.

Mr. Brooke: Clearly Parliament has lost a gem.

Mr. Blenkinsop: The hon. Member for Oldham, East (Sir I. Horobin) was saying:
…whilst honestly applying their minds to these matters, they do come to the most—".—[OFFICIAL. REPORT, Standing Committee A,13th December, 1956; c. 144.]
On that word "most" the hon. Member stopped. Perhaps he will tell the House later what he was about to say.

Mr. Brooke: If I do not pursue that, I assure the House that it is because I must have regard to the. Guillotine and must assist the Opposition by not spending further time on this interesting speculation.
The hon. and learned Member for Kettering and I have agreed that the Amendment is designed to prevent dwellings let for the first time since 1949 from becoming subject to the rent provisions of the Bill, unless they have been the subject of application to a rent tribunal before the commencement of the 1954 Act.
The case, as I understand it, which has been outlined to the House, is that rent tribunals fix reasonable rents, and, therefore, if we legislate to depart from that, the new rents will, on that evidence, be unreasonable. Let us go back over the history of this matter. In those days, after the end of the war, there was a feeling, and it was widely shared, that there were certain cases in which extortionate rents had been demanded and obtained, and that some machinery was desirable for mitigating that. The Labour Government of the time, which had a special love for the rent tribunal idea, decided that the rent tribunal would be an appropriate machine or device for deciding what a reasonable rent should be. In the first instance, until 1954, rent tribunals only had power to reduce rents.
Of course, under this Bill, a quite new situation arises. [HON. MEMBERS: "Hear, hear."] A much more logical and sensible situation arises. Up till now, there has not been any general and systematic method of adjusting rents over the whole field in the light of economic circumstances. The rent tribunal applied to certain classes of houses, and there was nothing else. Now, under this Bill, we are using—and I think there is common consent that it is a sensible idea—the new valuations as a basis for a formula for fixing maximum controlled rents. That is to say, the situation for which the rent tribunal was devised has been overtaken by the new system which we are establishing by Clause 1 of this Bill.
That is the reason why I could not advise the House to accept this Amendment, for everybody is agreed that there has been a chaotic system in the rent field. If we can now get the arrangement under Clause I established as the generally prevailing system, we shall iron out much the greater part of the anomalies that have hitherto existed. If we were to accept the Amendment we should be opening the door to other fresh anomalies that would not be in line with what we are doing for all other kinds of rents.

Mr. Janner: I am rather interested in the explanation which the right hon. Gentleman is giving, because he is saying precisely the opposite to what was being said in 1949. This is the very point which we are raising, and it was raised in 1949. Although there were controlled rents then, there was also an opportunity for people to put a reasonable case for a reduction of that rent in spite of the fact that there were such controlled rents. That is what we are asking for.

Mr. Brooke: It is now 1957, we have got these new 1956 valuations, and we are seeking to fix maximum controlled rents according to those new valuations.
Hon. Members have suggested that the rents fixed by the tribunals are reasonable, and that, therefore, anything else is unreasonable. I understand that they have made a further point that rents fixed by the tribunal might be either above or below the rent limits fixed by Clause 1 of this Bill, and feel that it was unfair to the tenant and unduly favourable to the landlord that, if the rent


fixed by the tribunal was higher than the rent limit, it should stay, but if it was lower, it might be raised to the rent limit.
6.15 p.m.
Of course, hon. Members cannot have it both ways. If the argument is that every rent fixed by a rent tribunal is reasonable, hon. Members must be arguing that in those cases where the rent fixed was above the rent limit set by the Bill, then what the Government are doing is to set the maximum unreasonably low. The Opposition must choose between these two arguments. They cannot possibly use both simultaneously. If they do, they destroy themselves.

Mr. Blenkinsop: The right hon. Gentleman is surely making a mountain out of a mole hill. What we are clearly saying here is that we are perfectly prepared to accept the tribunal's ruling about a reasonable rent. Whatever figure the tribunal decides upon we are prepared to accept.t, and we say it is reasonable. We are even allowing the tribunal to have second thoughts if the matter is referred to it for the second time. What the Minister is saying is that if the tribunal sets a rent limit higher than that in the Bill, the higher limit would stand, but if below, then the higher rent limit is to stand. The Minister wants to have the higher figure for the landlord, whichever way it goes, and we say that we will accept whatever figure the tribunal decides upon.

Mr. Brooke: I am not trying to make mountain out of a molehill. What I am trying to make is a piece of smooth-running machinery out of an old "tin Lizzie." It is because I believe that the system established by Clause 1 will be fairer and will do more to iron out anomalies that I must advise the House to reject the Amendment.

Mr. Tom Brown: Before the right hon. Gentleman leaves this question, I want to put to him a point of view which 1 hope will receive his sympathetic consideration, because the Bill now before the House seeks to abolish rent tribunals and the Amendment now under discussion seeks to continue them.
The point of view that I hold, after an examination of rent tribunals, is that they

have performed a very useful purpose, and that, while in 1949 and again in 1954, the people used to go into this business with great trepidation, having regard to the results of the consideration given to applications, the rent tribunals have now to a very large degree satisfied the people who have made application to them. We find that approximately 90 per cent. of the applications resulted in the rents being reduced; the other 10 per cent. of applicants had their rents increased, and that has happened in the last few years.
I am not concerned about that and am not finding fault with the decisions given by the rent tribunals. What I am concerned with at the moment—and there are other hon. Members on this side of the House who come from mining areas—is that the people living in the mining areas are suffering to a very large extent from damage to their property caused by mining subsidence, and they are reluctantly compelled to go to the rent tribunal to get a reasonable rent fixed. If in this Bill the Minister is to take away from them their right to go to the rent tribunal, these people will be placed at a great disadvantage in comparison with people living in normal property.
Therefore, I think the Minister ought to have regard to the unfortunate position in which these people are placed. It is quite true that they may be able to go to the local authority and get a certificate of disrepair, but, unfortunately, if they do, the landlord cannot repair the property because of the shocking state it is in, and the tenants are compelled to go elsewhere. They have no recourse to any tribunal. They may be able to go to the county court, but imagine a tenant living in a house—of which there are many in my division—where he can neither open the windows nor shut the doors, and has to go to bed without locking up because the condition of the property is so bad that he cannot do so.
Therefore, the Minister should have regard to the conditions under which some of our people are living. Instead, he is attempting to take away something which—I was about to say that people have enjoyed, but they have not enjoyed it—has afforded to them a great deal of protection, namely, the protection hitherto afforded to them of making application to the rent tribunals. I will not repeat the argument advanced by my


hon. and right hon. Friends, but I make a special plea to the right hon. Gentleman, to his Parliamentary Secretary and to his Department to give sympathetic consideration to this point before finally rejecting the Amendment.

Mr. John McKay: We are dealing here with something of vital importance to the ordinary citizen. In my study of political philosophy I have always understood that law is the outcome of civilisation, and that law is made for the definite purpose of giving freedom to the better types of men and also to penalise the evildoer.
There is a critical situation in this country about the housing of our people, and in dealing with that we are dealing with one of the fundamental necessities of the family and of human welfare. Men and women and their families have to tighten their belts on occasion and take less rations than they ought to receive. To some extent, they can meet economic difficulties, hut a house is a fundamental need of the family.
We know that law is expected to give greater freedom for the best activities of mankind, but the political philosophy of the Government is to give greater freedom in the charging of rent. Even if that philosophy of freedom can be extended to this subject, the question arises whether, on a mater which affects every household in the country, it is right to allow landlords absolute freedom to charge what rents they wish.
That is the great weakness of this Bill. There may have been a need to revise rent legislation, but it does not follow that in the process of giving more freedom the Government should throw away their responsibilities to their fellow men, particularly the poorer sections of the community. Surely the responsibility of the Government is to ensure that in giving greater freedom in charging rent there should be some protection given to the masses of the people from the evildoers? Yet, unless a similar Amendment to this one is made in the Bill, it will give practically wholesale freedom on a question of fundamental importance to the people.
Therefore, on the general ground alone that there should be substantial protection for tenants and a definite restriction placed upon those who would take

advantage of such a situation, I urge the Government to accept the Amendment. As the Bill stands, it allows any landlord who has no concern for humanity or morality to take advantage of the circumstances under which people are living.
The Minister has said that he believes in freedom and that rents should be governed by supply and demand, but has the tenant who is given notice to quit or notice to pay an increased rent any real freedom? Of course he has not. He may be confined to a given district because of his work, or there may be other important factors which make it necessary for him to retain the house, even if an extortionate rent is demanded. I believe, therefore, that this Amendment, which gives some protection to the ordinary people who may have been exploited, is an important one.

Mr. C. W. Gibson: I do not understand the arguments put forward by the Minister for rejecting this Amendment. They seem to me to be as unreal as the arguments we used to get from the first Parliamentary Secretary when this Bill was introduced. It may be the fruits of keeping bad company, but we expect more humanity in the minds of those who are handling this question, especially from one who lives near the Vale of Health, as does the right hon. Gentleman.
The Minister suggested that the Bill was an attempt to bring order out of chaos. All I can say is that he has not been to many meetings at which people have been asking questions about the Measure. They will be in a dreadful muddle when it becomes operative because, as the Minister knows and as we have heard again this afternoon, there is still no agreement amongst the lawyers as to what certain parts of it mean.
We are asking that there should be some machinery not only to guarantee the landlord a fair rent, but to give the tenant a sense of justice and fair play. That is precisely what the rent tribunals have done. During the Committee stage, some of us gave the number of cases heard by the tribunals. In some cases the tribunals raised the rent; in many more they reduced the rent after careful and expert consideration of all the facts. It seems to me that there could hardly


be anything fairer than the way in which the rent tribunals have performed their work.
Of course, this Amendment would mean that many landlords would not get double the gross rateable value as the rent for their houses because their houses would not be worth it. The House ought to know that during the Committee stage it was admitted from the Government side that even the landlord of a house which is unfit to live in, which is known to be unlit to live in, but which has not yet reached the stage where it becomes part of an order for slum clearance, can charge double the gross rateable value, and, if he says that he will carry out all the repairs, he can charge 2¼ times the gross rateable value.

6.30 p.m.

Mr. Brooke: The landlord cannot get any increased rent at all until that house is in proper repair.

Mr. Gibson: Of course he can. This only illustrates how difficult it is to deal with the Minister. The tenant must get the certificate of disrepair—and the tenant who understands the Bill and can handle all the prescribed forms in it will be a first-class lawyer who could get a good job in the courts anywhere. Even the professional organisations do not understand it. To say that the landlord cannot get an increase in rent because the house is not in repair is nonsense on the reading of the Bill. Unless a certificate of disrepair is given—and even then he can

take months over it —the landlord can get the maximum rent lain clown in the Bill. Does the Minister deny that?

Mr. Brooke: The hon. Member was speaking of a house which had been declared unfit by the local authority.

Mr. Gibson: The Minister must not do that sort of thing in the House of Commons. I did not say that. I said it was a house known to be unfit, but which had not yet reached the stage of being in an order for clearance under a slum-clearance scheme.
The Minister knows that local authorities have returned to him a list of 800,000 houses which are unfit to live in and which ought to be pulled down, but that, so far, only about 350,000 of them have reached the stage where they are in orders for slum clearance, for pulling down and rebuilding. The remaining 450,000 are unfit, but the landlord might charge a rent of double the gross rateable value. That is according to the Bill.
No rent tribunal such as we are suggesting would think of allowing the landlord of such a house to charge the rent which the Bill will give him. The Amendment is a fair and reasonable proposition and I am amazed that the Minister should have trotted out the arguments which he has used in an attempt to have it rejected. I hope the House will agree to it.

Question put, That those words be there inserted in the Bill:—

The House divided: Ayes 232, Noes 276.

Division No. 82.]
AYES
[6.33 p.m.


Ainsley, J. W.
Butler, Herbert (Hackney, C.)
Edwards, Rt. Hon. John (Brighouse)


Albu, A. H.
Butler, Mrs. Joyce (Wood Green)
Edwards, Rt. Hon. Ness (Caerphilly)


Allaun, Frank (Salford, E.)
Callaghan, L. J.
Edwards, Robert (Bilston)


Allen, Arthur (Bosworth)
Carmichael, J.
Edwards, W. J. (Stepney)


Allen, Scholefield (Crewe)
Champion, A. J.
Evans, Albert (Islington, S.W.)


Awbery, S. S.
Chapman, W. D.
Evans, Edward (Lowestoft)


Bacon, Miss Alice
Chetwynd, G. R.
Fernyhough, E.


Baird, J.
Coldrick, W.
Finch, H. J.


Balfour, A.
Collick, P. H. (Birkenhead)
Fletcher, Eric


Bence, C. R. (Dunbartonshire, E.)
Collins, V. J. (Shoreditch &amp; Finsbury)
Forman, J. C.


Benn, Hn. Wedgwood (Bristol, S.E.)
Corbet, Mrs, Freda
Caitskell, Rt. Hon. H. T. N.


Benson, G.
Cove, W. G.
Gibson, C. W.


Beswick, Frank
Craddock, George (Bradford, S.)
Gooch, E. G.


Blackburn, F.
Cronin, J. D.
Gordon Walker, Rt. Hon. P. G.


Blenkinsop, A.
Cullen, Mrs. A.
Greenwood, Anthony


Blyton, W. R.
Dalton, Rt. Hon. H.
Grenfell, Rt. Hon. D. R.


Boardman, H.
Davies, Harold (Leek)
Grey, C. F.


Bowden, H. W. (Leicester, S,W.)
Davies, Stephen (Merthyr)
Griffiths, Rt. Hon. James (Llanelly)


Bowles, F. G.
de Freitas, Geoffrey
Hall, Rt. Hn. Glenvil (Colne Valley)


Boyd, T. C.
Delargy, H. J.
Hamilton, W. W.


Braddock, Mrs. Elizabeth
Dodds, N. N.
Hannan, W.


Brookway, A. F.
Donnelly, D. L.
Harrison, J. (Nottingham, N.)


Broughton, Dr. A. D. D.
Dugdale, Rt. Hn. John (W. Brmwch)
Hastings, S.


Brown, Thomas (Ince)
Dye, S.
Hayman, F. H.


Burke, W. A.
Ede, Rt. Hon. J. C.
Healey, Denis


Burton, Miss F. E.
Edelman, M.
Henderson, Rt. Hn. A. (Rwly Regis)




Herbison, Miss M.
Mellish, R. J.
Skeffington, A. M.


Hobson, C. R. (Keighley)
Messer, Sir F.
Slater, Mrs. H. (Stoke, N.)


Holman, P.
Mitchison, G. R.
Slater, J. (Sedgefield)


Holmes, Horace
Monslow, W.
Smith, Ellis (Stoke, S.)


Howell, Charles (Perry Barr)
Moody, A. S.
Sorensen, R. W.


Howell, Denis (All Saints)
Morris, Percy (Swansea, W.)
Soskice, Rt. Hon. Sir Frank


Hoy, J. H.
Morrison,Rt.Hn.Herbert(Lewis'm,S.)
Sparks, J. A.


Hubbard, T. F.
Mort, D. L.
Steele, T.


Hughes, Cledwyn (Anglesey)
Moss, R.
Stewart, Michael (Fulham)


Hughes, Emrys (S. Ayrshire)
Moyle, R.
Stones, W. (Consett)


Hughes, Hector (Aberdeen, N.)
Mulley, F. W.
Stonehouse, J. T.


Hunter, A. E.
Neal, Harold (Bolsover)
Strauss, Rt. Hon. George (Vauxhall)


Hynd, H. (Accrington)
Oliver, G. H.
Summerskill, Rt. Hon. E.


Hynd, J. B. (Attercliffe)
Orbach, M.
Swingler, S. T.


Irvine, A. J. (Edge Hill)
Oswald, T.
Sylvester, G. O.


Irving, Sydney (Dartford)
Owen, W. J.
Taylor, Bernard (Mansfield)


Isaacs, Rt. Hon. G. A.
Padley, W. E.
Taylor, John (West Lothian)


Janner, B.
Paget, R. T.
Thomas, George (Cardiff)


Jay, Rt. Hon. D. P. T.
Paling, Rt. Hon. W. (Dearne Valley)
Thomas, Iorwerth (Rhonda, W.)


Jeger, Mrs. Lena(Holbn &amp; St.Pncs,S.)
Palmer, A. M. F.
Thomson, George (Dundee, E.)


Jenkins, Roy (Stechford)
Panned, Charles (Leeds, W.)
Thornton, E.


Johnston, Douglas (Paisley)
Pargiter, G. A.
Timmons, J.


Jones, Rt. Hon. A. Creech (Wakefield)
Parker, J.
Tomney, F.


Jones, David (The Hartlepools)
Parkin, B. T.
Ungoed-Thomas, Sir Lynn


Jones, Jack (Rotherham)
Paton, John
Usborne, H. C.


Jones, J. Idwal (Wrexham)
Pearson, A.
Viant, S. P.


Jones, T. W. (Merioneth)
Peart, T. F.
Warbey, W. N.


Key, Rt. Hon. C. W.
Pentland, N.
Watkins, T. E.


King, Dr. H. M.
Plummer, Sir Leslie
Weitzman, D.


Lawson, G. M.
Popplewell, E.
Wells, Percy (Faversham)


Ledger, R. J.
Price, J. T. (Westhoughton)
Wells, William (Walsall, N.)


Lee, Frederick (Newton)
Price, Philips (Gloucestershire, W.)
West, D. G.


Lee, Miss Jennie (Cannook)
Probert, A. R.
Wheeldon, W. E.


Lever, Leslie (Ardwick)
Proctor, W. T.
White, Mrs. Eirene (E. Flint)


Lewis, Arthur
Pryde D. J.
White, Henry (Derbyshire, N.E.)


Lindgren, G. S.
Randall, H. E.
Wigg, George


Lipton, Marcus
Rankin, John
Wilcock, Group Capt. C. A. B.


MacColl, J. E.
Redhead, E. C.
Wilkins, W. A.


MacDermot, Niall
Reeves, J.
Willey, Frederick


McGhee, H. G.
Reid, William
Williams, David (Neath)


McGovern, J.
Robens, Rt. Hon. A.
Williams, Rev. Llywelyn (Ab'tillery)


Mclnnes, J.
Roberts, Albert (Normanton)
Williams, Ronald (Wigan)


McKay, John (Wallsend)
Roberts, Goronwy (Caernarvon)
Williams, Rt. Hon. T. (Don Valley)


MacMillan, M. K. (Western Isles)
Robinson, Kenneth (St. Pancras, N.)
Williams, W. R. (Openshaw)


MacPherson, Malcolm (Stirling)
Rogers, George (Kensington, N.)
Williams, W. T. (Barons Court)


Mahon, Simon
Ross, William
Willis, Eustace (Edinburgh, E.)


Mainwaring, W. H,
Royle, C.
Wilson, Rt. Hon. Harold (Huyton)


Mallalieu, E. L. (Brigg)
Shinwell, Rt. Hon. E.
Woof, R. E.


Mallalieu, J. P. W. (Huddersfd, E.)
Shurmer, P. L. E.
Yates, V. (Ladywood)


Mann, Mrs. Jean
Silverman, Julius (Aston)
Younger, Rt. Hon. K.


Mason, Roy
Silverman, Sydney (Nelson)



Mayhew, C. P.
Simmons, C. J. (Brierley Hill)
TELLERS FOR THE AYES:




Mr. Short and Mr. Deer.




NOES


Agnew, Sir Peter
Body, R. F.
Crouch, R. F.


Aitken, W. T.
Bossom, Sir Alfred
Crowder, Sir John (Finchley)


Allan, R. A. (Paddington, S.)
Bowen, E. R. (Cardigan)
Crowder, Petre (Ruislip—Northwood)


Alport, C. J. M.
Boyd-Carpenter, Rt. Hon. J. A.
Cunningham, Knox


Amery, Julian (Preston, N.)
Boyle, Sir Edward
Currie, G. B. H.


Amory, Rt. Hn. Heathcoat (Tiverton)
Braine, B. R.
Dance, J. C. G.


Anstruther-Gray, Major Sir William
Braithwaite, Sir Albert (Harrow, W.)
Davidson, Viscountess


Arbuthnot, John
Bromley-Davenport, Lt.-Col. W. H.
Deedes, W. F.


Armstrong, C. W.
Brooke, Rt. Hon. Henry
Digby, Simon Wingfield


Ashton, H.
Brooman-White, R. C.
Doughty, C. J. A.


Astor, Hon. J. J.
Browne, J. Nixon (Craigton)
du Cann, E. D. L.


Atkins, H. E.
Bryan, P.
Dugdale, Rt. Hn. Sir T. (Richmond)


Baldock, Lt.-Cmdr. J. M.
Bullus, Wing Commander E. E.
Duncan, Capt. J. A. L.


Baldwin, A. E.
Burden, F. F. A.
Duthie, W. S.


Balniel, Lord
Butcher, Sir Herbert
Eden, J. B. (Bournemouth, West)


Barber, Anthony
Campbell, Sir David
Elliott, R. W.


Barter, John
Carr, Robert
Emmet, Hon. Mrs. Evelyn


Baxter, Sir Beverley
Cary, Sir Robert
Farey-Jones, F. W.


Beamish, Maj. Tufton
Channon, Sir Henry
Fell, A.


Bell, Ronald (Bucks, S.)
Chichester-Clark, R.
Finlay, Graeme


Bennett, F. M. (Torquay)
Clarke, Brig. Terenoe (Portsmth, W.)
Fisher, Nigel


Bennett, Dr. Reginald
Conant, Maj. Sir Roger
Fletcher-Coolie, C.


Bevins, J. R. (Toxteth)
Cooke, Robert
Fort, R.


Bidgood, J. C.
Cooper, A. E.
Fraser, Sir Ian (M'cmbe &amp; Lonsdale)


Biggs-Davison, J. A.
Cooper-Key, E. M.
Freeth, Denzil


Birch, Rt. Hon. Nigel
Cordeaux, Lt.-Col. J. K.
Garner-Evans, E. H.


Bishop, F. P.
Corfield, Capt. F. V.
George, J. C. (Pollok)


Black, C. W.
Craddock, Beresford (Speithorne)
Gibson-Watt, D.







Godber, J- B.
Lambert, Hon. G.
Ramsden, J. E.


Gomme-Duncan, Col. Sir Alan
Lancaster, Col. C. G.
Rawlinson, Peter


Goodhart, P. C.
Leavey, J. A.
Redmayne, M.


Gough, C. F. H.
Leburn, W. G.
Rees-Davies, W. R.


Gower, H. R.
Legge-Bourke, Maj. E. A. H.
Remnant, Hon. P.


Graham, Sir Fergus
Lindsay, Hon. James (Devon, N.)
Renton, D. L. M.


Green, A.
Linstead, Sir H. N.
Ridsdate, J. E.


Gresham Cooke, R.
Llewellyn, D. T.
Rippon, A. G. F.


Grimond, J.
Lloyd, Maj. Sir Guy (Renfrew, E.)
Robertson, Sir David


Grimston, Hon. John (St. Albans)
Low, Rt. Hon. A. R. W.
Robson-Brown, W.


Grimston, Sir Robert (Westbury)
Lucas, Sir Jocelyn (Portsmouth, S.)
Roper, Sir Harold


Grosvenor, Lt.-Col. R. G.
Lucas, P. B. (Brentford &amp; Chiswick)
Ropner, Col. Sir Leonard


Gurden, Harold
Lucas-Tooth, Sir Hugh
Russell, R. S.


Hall, John (Wycombe)
McAdden, S. J.
Sandys, Rt. Hon. D.


Hare, Rt. Hon. J. H.
Maodonald, Sir Peter
Schofield, Lt-Col. W.


Harris, Frederic (Croydon, N.W.)
Mackeson, Brig. Sir Harry
Scott-Miller, Cmdr. R.


Harris, Reader (Heston)
Mackie, J. H. (Galloway)
Sharpies, R. C.


Harrison, A. B. C. (Maldon)
McLaughlin, Mrs. P.
Shepherd, William


Harrison, Col. J. H. (Eye)
McLean, Neil (Inverness)
Smithers, Peter (Winchester)


Harvey, Air Cdre. A. V. (Macclesfd)
MaoLeod, John (Ross &amp; Cromarty)
Smyth, Brig. Sir John (Norwood)


Harvey, Ian (Harrow, E.)
Macpherson, Niall (Dumfries)
Soames, Christopher


Harvey, John (Walthamstow, E.)
Maddan, Martin
Spearman, Sir Alexander


Harvie-Watt, Sir George
Maitland, Cdr. J. F. W. (Horncastle)
Speir, R. M.


Hay, John
Maitland, Hon. Patrick (Lanark)
Spence, H. R. (Aberdeen, W.)


Heald, Rt. Hon. Sir Lionel
Manningham-Buller, Rt. Hn. Sir R.
Spens, Rt. Hn. Sir P.(Kens'gt'n, S..


Heath, Rt. Hon. E. R. G.
Marlowe, A. A. H.
Stanley, Capt. Hon. Richard


Henderson, John (Cathcart)
Marshall, Douglas
Stevens, Geoffrey


Hesketh, R. F.
Mathew, R.
Steward, Harold (Stockport, S.)


Hicks-Beach, Maj. W. W.
Maude, Angus
Stewart, Sir J. Henderson (Fife, E.)


Hill, Rt. Hon. Charles (Luton)
Maulding, Rt. Hon. R.
Stoddart-Scott, Col. M.


Hill, Mrs. E. (Wythenshawe)
Mawby, R. L.
Stuart, Rt. Hon. James (Moray)


Hill, John (S. Norfolk)
Maydon, Lt.-Comdr. S. L. C.
Studholme, Sir Henry


Hinchingbrooke, Viscount
Medlicott, Sir Frank
Summers, Sir Spencer


Hobson, J. G. S.(War'ck&amp;Leam'gtn)
Milligan, Rt. Hon. W. R.
Taylor, Sir Charles (Eastbourne)


Holland-Martin, C. J.
Moore, Sir Thomas
Temple, John M.


Holt, A. F.
Morrison, John (Salisbury)
Thomas, Leslie (Canterbury)


Hornby, R. P.
Mott-Radclyffe, Sir Charles
Thomas, P. J. M. (Conway)


Homsby-Smith, Miss M. P.
Nabarro, G. D, N.
Thompson, Lt.-Cdr.R.(Croydon, S)


Horobin, Sir Ian
Nairn, D. L. S.
Thorneycroft, Rt. Hon. P.


Horsbrugh, Rt. Hon. Dame Florence
Neave, Airey
Thornton-Kemsley, C. N.


Howard, Hon. Greville (St. Ives)
Nichols, Harmar
Tiley, A. (Bradford, W.)


Howard, John (Test)
Nicholson, Godfrey (Farnham)
Turner, H. F. L.


Hughes Hallett, Vice-Admiral J.
Nicolson, N. (B'n'm'th, E. &amp; Chr'ch)
Turton, Rt. Hon. R. H.


Hughes-Young, M. H. C.
Noble, Comdr. A. H. P.
Tweedsmuir, Lady


Hulbert, Sir Norman
Nugent, G. R. H.
Vaughan-Morgan, J. K.


Hutchison, Sir Ian Clark (E'b'gh, W.)
Oakshott, H. D.
Vickers, Miss Joan


Hutchison, Sir James (Scotstoun)
O'Neill, Hn. Phelim (Co. Antrim, N.)
Vosper, Rt. Hon. D. F.


Hyde, Montgomery
Ormsby-Gore, Rt. Hon. W. D.
Wade, D. W.


Hylton-Foster, Rt. Hon. Sir Harry
Orr, Capt. L. P. S.
Wakefield, Sir Wavell (St. M'lebone)


Iremonger, T, L.
Orr-Ewing, Charles Ian (Hendon, N.)
Walker-Smith, Rt. Hon. D. C.


Irvine, Bryant Godman (Rye)
Orr-Ewing, Sir Ian (Weston-S-Mare)
Ward, Rt. Hon. G. R. (Worcester)


Jenkins, Robert (Dulwich)
Osborne, C.
Ward, Dame Irene (Tynemouth)


Jennings, J. C. (Burton)
Page, R. G.
Waterhouse, Capt. Rt. Hon. C.


Johnson, Dr. Donald (Carlisle)
Pannell, N. A. (Kirkdale)
Watkinson, R. Hon. Harold


Johnson, Eric (Blackley)
Partridge, E.
Webbe, Sir H.


Johnson, Howard (Kemptown)
Peyton, J. W. W.
Whitelaw, W.S.I.(Penrith &amp; Border)


Joseph, Sir Keith
Pike, Miss Mervyn
Williams, Paul (Sutherland, S.)


Joynson-Hicks, Hon. Sir Lancelot
Pilkington, Capt. R. A.
Williams, R. Dudley (Exeter)


Keegan, D.
Pitman, I. J.
Wills, G. (Bridgwater)


Kerby, Capt. H. B.
Pitt, Miss E. M.
Wilson, Geoffrey (Truro)


Kerr, H. W.
Pott, H.P.
Wood, Hon. R.


Kershaw, J. A.
Powell, J. Enoch
Yates, William (The Wrekin)


Kimball, M.
Price, Henry (Lewisham, W.)



Kirk, P. M.
Prior-Palmer, Brig. O. L.
TELLERS FOR THE NOES:


Lagden, G. W.
Raikes, Sir Victor
Mr. E. Wakefield and Mr. Legh.

Clause 2.—(PROCEDURE FOR INCREASING RENTS.)

Mr. C. W. Key: I beg to move, in page 2, line 33 to leave out "three" and to insert "nine".
I think that it would be convenient, Mr. Speaker, to consider with this Amendment the Amendment in line 36, leave out "nine" and insert "fifteen".

Mr. Speaker: By all means.

Mr. Key:: I find that the more people who learn what the Bill will do for them when it becomes law, the greater is their fear of the effect it will have upon them and their families. They feel that there is much that they will have to do in order to adapt themselves to the conditions which the Bill will create for them.
6.45 p.m.
For many of those whom I have met the increase in rent will be very considerable indeed, and what I am claiming, in moving the Amendment, is that they should have more time to think out their problems and devise ways and means of meeting the difficulties with which they will be faced and of adapting themselves to the new conditions that will come. Many of them, the sick, the aged, the unemployed and the partially unemployed, will have a very difficult job indeed. They are already suffering from increased prices, increased cost of transport, payments for prescriptions, and things of that kind, and they will now be faced with a very serious increase in rent.
I know that in certain parts of the country the effect of the Bill will be different from that in other parts. I am now speaking mainly on behalf of my own constituents and what the Bill will mean to people in my own area. Three months after the Bill becomes operative, they will have to face an increase in rent of 7s. 6d. a week. After they have paid that increase for six months many of them will have to pay an additional 5s. or 10s. a week. This latter change will come into operation twelve months or a little more from now. I claim that is much too short a period for them to face up to their problems, and I am proposing to increase the period in each case from three to nine months and from nine to fifteen months.
I was talking last week to a man with a wife and five children whose wage averages rather less than £7 a week. His house has a net rateable value of £27 and a gross value of £39 and he is at present paying a net rent of 16s. 7d, a week and 8s. 6d. a week for rates. Therefore, his inclusive weekly payment for the house is 25s. 1d. per week. When the Bill comes into operation the rent will rise ultimately to twice the gross value and will be 30s. a week. If the landlord goes into that house and sees the condition in which the tenant has kept it by painting, whitewashing and doing other jobs himself, the landlord will very likely elect in future to be responsible for the internal repairs and the net rent can then go up to 35s. a week.
Because of the operations of the Minister in other directions, by reducing

the rateable value of shops, public-houses, banks and cinemas, the local rates will rise again, and this man's local rate will rise by 3s. in the £, or about 1s. 6d. a week, so that the total rent, including rates, which he will have to pay practically twelve months from today will be 45s. a week, an increase of over £1. It will be impossible for him to adapt himself to these conditions. It is no use saying that he must go into smaller accommodation and pay a smaller rent. He cannot do that because there is no vacant accommodation in his area. It is no use saying that he should live elsewhere, because, if he did that and got a house at a lower rent, he would have to pay increased fares to take him back to his job in the area where he now is. In that case, he and his family have to adapt themselves to very serious conditions. I see no hope, except for his wife to go out to work to earn a little at the expense of leaving her family. He has a boy who is nearing the legal school-leaving age and who is regarded as one of the brilliant boys at his school. The boy should go on to further education, as he is now qualified to do, but he must abandon that and leave school to earn money to help to pay an inordinate increase in rent. We should give such people more time to adapt themselves to these things.
In Committee upstairs, when he had opposition and pressure from his own side, the Minister said that he was prepared to extend the period from nine months to fifteen months for properties which were to become decontrolled. The tenants of such properties will not only have security of tenure for fifteen months, but will pay the same rent for that time, while the poorer people about whom I have been speaking will have no such advantage. Upstairs the Minister said that he was doing that to ease and smooth the period of decontrol. I am asking him to ease and smooth the period for these people who are faced with great increases in rent.

Mr. J. A. Sparks: Time is going on and the Guillotine falls at seven o'clock, but I should like briefly to support the Amendment for two reasons. The first is that the period during which the notice of increase takes effect, three months, is not long enough to give a tenant an opportunity, if he so thinks fit,


of pursuing the course laid down in the Bill and obtaining a certificate of disrepair.
There will be a good deal of argument between tenants and landlords about who is responsible for which repairs. We know that after serving notice on the landlord with a list of the repairs necessary, the tenant can do nothing for six weeks, so that the landlord may have a chance to get the repairs done. Even then, if nothing is done and an application is made to the local authority, the local authority cannot issue a certificate of disrepair until three more weeks have elapsed, a total of twelve weeks out of the three months allowed before the notice of increase becomes effective.
Having in mind the fact that when the landlord serves a notice of increase the tenant will not be ready the next day to put in a list of repairs, and will probably indulge in argument with the landlord about repairs for a few weeks, the time is excessively short. It may well be that the landlord will verbally undertake to do some repairs, perhaps with no intention of doing them. That will cause a further delay either in the tenant submitting a list of repairs to the landlord, or applying to the local authority for a certificate of disrepair.
The period of three months will quickly elapse and the tenant will be called upon to pay an increased rent, not having had time to get a certificate of disrepair from the local authority. That state of affairs may drag on for the ensuing six months for which time, if he had been able to get a certificate of disrepair and if the repairs had not been done by the landlord, the tenant would get a refund of the excess rent paid.
This initial period of three months is far too short. The right hon. Gentleman has constantly stressed that landlords cannot get an increase unless they do the repairs. In a great many cases that is absolute nonsense because the procedure is very complicated and large numbers of tenants will not understand it, so that the three months will elapse and the following six months will elapse and tenants wit find themselves paying the rent increases, the repairs not having been done.
My second reason is that in London and in many other towns and cities the increases will be very considerable for

many people. There are many cases in my constituency where the increase will be 30s., and in more cases it will be about £1 a week. It is a blow to a family to be faced with a rent increase of as much as 30s. As the Bill stands, tenants will have to pay the first 7s. 6d. in the first nine months after the service of a notice of increase and after that nine months the balance between 7s. 6d. and 30s., namely, 22s. 6d. That is far too much to expect people to pay, and I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will agree to our proposals which extend the period of time and give people an opportunity to try to find the money which landlords will demand of them.

Mr. Bevins: The two Amendments contain the perfectly simple proposition that the three months' notice of increase in rent should be extended to a period of nine months and that in the following six months the increase in rent should be limited to 7s. 6d., as it now is. I understood the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Poplar (Mr. Key) to argue that the total period suggested in the two Amendments, namely, fifteen months, would be the same as the standstill of fifteen months in Clause 10. The right hon. Gentleman devoted most of his speech to arguing the case that there were many families who would not be able to afford an increase in rent when the increases became payable.
However, the Amendments have no connection with rent increases prescribed in the Bill and merely refer to the waiting period before rent increases can be made, an entirely separate proposition. The Bill was published towards the end of last year and will probably become law about June or July of this year, and a period of three months must elapse after the Bill becomes law and the actual application of rent increases takes effect. That takes us to about October, so that those tenants who have been following the progress of the Bill from the start—I have no doubt that a great many constituents of hon. Gentlemen opposite have informed——

Mr. Percy Shurmer: The argument is whether we should increase the period or not. It is well known that over recent years many property-owning companies have bought property, but the Government are


helping property owners because they are supposed to be so poor. Is the hon. Gentleman aware that in Birmingham yesterday one of these poor property owners spent £10,000 on his daughter's wedding and had a special train to go to Birmingham? These poor property owners are to be helped while people starve as a result.

Mr. Bevins: I have no doubt that the hon. Gentleman informed all his constituents of the evils of the Bill many months ago.

Mr. Shurmer: And I shall continue to do so and get them to strike if I can.

Mr. Bevins: But even——

Mr. Shurmer: I shall get them to refuse to pay the rent increase, if I can.

Mr. Bevins: —if the tenants are not, perhaps, so well-informed as the constituents of the hon. Gentleman, not well-informed in all respects, which from the hon. Gentleman's——

It being Seven o'clock, Mr. SPEAKER proceeded, pursuant to Orders, to put forthwith the Question already proposed from the Chair.

Question put, That "three" stand part of the Bill:—

The House divided: Ayes 274, Noes 233.

Division No. 83.]
AYES
[7.0 p.m.


Agnew, Sir Peter
Crowder, Petre (Rulstip—Northwood)
Hill, Mrs. E. (Wythenshawe)


Aitken, W. T.
Cunningham, Knox
Hill, John (S. Norfolk)


Allan, R. A. (Paddington, S.)
Currie, G. B. H.
Hinchingbrooke, Viscount


Alport, C. J. M.
Dance, J. C. G.
Hobson, J. G. S.(War'ck &amp; Leam'gtn)


Amery, Julian (Preston, N.)
Davidson, Viscountess
Holland-Martin, C. J.


Amory, Rt. Hn. Heathcoat (Tiverton)
Deedes, W. F.
Holt, A. F.


Anstruther-Cray, Major Sir William
Dighy, Simon Wingfield
Hornby, R. P.


Arbuthnot, John
Doughty, C. J. A.
Hornsby-Smith, Miss M. P.


Armstrong, C. W.
du Cann, E. D. L.
Horobin, Sir Ian


Ashton, H.
Dugdale, Rt. Hn. Sir T. (Richmond)
Horsbrugh, Rt. Hon. Dame Florence


Astor, Hon. J. J.
Duncan, Capt. J. A. L.
Howard, Hon. Greville (St. Ives)


Atkins, H. E.
Duthie, W. S.
Howard, John (Test)


Baldock, Lt.-Cmdr. J. M.
Eden, J. B. (Bournemouth, West)
Hughes Hallett, Vice-Admiral J.


Baldwin, A. E.
Elliott, R. W.
Hughes-Young, M. H. C.


Balniel, Lord
Emmet, Hon. Mrs. Evelyn
Hulbert, Sir Norman


Barber, Anthony
Farey-Jones, F. W.
Hutchison, Sir Ian Clark (E'b'gh, W.)


Barter, John
Fell, A.
Hutchison, Sir James (Scotstoun)


Baxter, Sir Beverley
Finlay, Graeme
Hyde, Montgomery


Beamish, Maj. Tufton
Fisher, Nigel
Hylton-Foster, Rt. Hon. Sir Harry


Bell, Ronald (Bucks, S.)
Fletcher-Cooke, G.
Iremonger, T. L.


Bennett, F. M. (Torquay)
Fort, R.
Irvine, Bryant Godman (Rye)


Bennett, Dr. Reginald
Fraser, Sir Ian (M'cmbe &amp; Lonsdaie)
Jenkins, Robert (Dulwich)


Bevins, J. R. (Toxteth)
Freeth, Denzil
Jennings, J. C. (Burton)


Bidgood, J. C.
Garner-Evans, E. H.
Johnson, Dr. Donald (Carlisle)


Biggs-Davison, J. A.
George, J. C. (Pollok)
Johnson, Eric (Blackley)


Birch, Rt. Hon. Nigel
Gibson-Watt, D.
Johnson, Howard (Kemptewn)


Bishop, F. P.
Godber, J. B.
Joseph, Sir Keith


Black, C. W.
Gomme-Duncan, Col. Sir Alan
Joynson-Hicks, Hon. Sir Lancelot


Body, R. F.
Goodhart, P. C.
Kaberry, D.


Bossom, Sir Alfred
Gough, C. F. H.
Keegan, D.


Bowen, E. R. (Cardigan)
Gower, H. R.
Kerby, Capt. H. B.


Boyd-Carpenter, Rt. Hon. J. A,
Graham, Sir Fergus
Kerr, H. W.


Boyle, Sir Edward
Green, A.
Kershaw, J. A.


Braine, B. R.
Gresham Cooke, R.
Kimball, M.


Braithwaite, Sir Albert (Harrow, W.)
Grimond, J.
Kirk P. M.


Bromley-Davenport, Lt.-Col. W. H.
Grimston, Hon. John (St. Albans)
Lagden, G. W.


Brooke, Rt. Hon. Henry
Grimston, Sir Robert (Westbury)
Lambert, Hon. G.


Brooman-White, R. C.
Grosvenor, Lt.-Col. R. G.
Lancaster, Col. C. G.


1Browne, J. Nixon (Craigton)
Gurden, Harold
Leavey, J. A.


Bryan, P.




Bullus, Wing Commander, E. E.
Hall, John (Wycombe)
Leburn, W. G.


Burden, F. F. A.
Hare, Rt. Hon. J. H.
Legge-Bourke, Maj. E. A. H.


Butcher, Sir Herbert
Harris, Frederic (Croydon, N.W.)
Legh, Hon. Peter (Petersfisld)


Campbell Sir David
Harris, Reader (Heston)
Lindsay, Hon. James (Devon N.)


Carr, Robert
Harrison, A. B. C. (Maldon)
Linstead, Sir H. N.


Cary, Sir Robert
Harrison, Col. J. H. (Eye)
Llewellyn, D. T.


Channon, Sir Henry
Harvey, Air Cdre. A. V. (Macclesfd)
Lloyd, Maj. Sir Guy (Renfrew, E.)


Chichester-Clark, R.
Harvey, Ian (Hisrrow, E.)
Low, Rt. Hon. A. R. W.


Clarke, Brig. Terence (Portsmth, W.)
Harvey, John (Walthamstow, E.)
Lucas, Sir Jocelyn (Portsmouth, S.)


Conant, Maj. Sir Roger
Harvie-Watt, Sir George
Lucas, P. B. (Brentford &amp; Chiswick)


Cooke, Robert
Hay, John
Lucas-Tooth, Sir Hugh


Cooper-Key, E. M.
Heald, Rt. Hon. Sir Lionel
McAdden, S. J.


Cordeaux, Lt.-Col. J. K.
Heath, Rt. Hon. E. R. G.
Macdonald, Sir Peter


Corfield, Capt. F. V.
Henderson, John (Cathoart)
Mackeson, Brig. Sir Harry


Craddook, Beresford (Spelthorne)
Hesketh, R. F.
Mackie, J. H. (Galloway)


Crouch, R. F.
Hicks-Beach, Maj. W. W.
McLaughlin, Mrs. P.


Crowder, Sir John (Finchley)
Hill, Rt. Hon. Charles (Luton)
McLean, Neil (Inverness)




MacLeod, John (Ross &amp; Cromarty)
Pilkington, Capt. R. A.
Stuart, Rt. Hon. James (Moray)


Macmillan, Maurice (Halifax)
Pitman, I. J.
Studholme, Sir Henry


Macpherson, Niall (Dumfries)
Pitt, Miss E. M.
Summers, Sir Spencer


Maddan, Martin
Pott, H. P.
Taylor, Sir Charles (Eastbourne)


Maitland, Cdr. J. F. W. (Hornoastle)
Powell, J. Enoch
Temple, J. M.


Maitland, Hon. Patrick (Lanark)
Price, Henry (Lewisham, W.)
Thomas, Leslie (Canterbury)


Manningham-Buller, Rt. Hn. Sir R.
Prior-Palmer, Brig. O. L.
Thomas, P. J. M. (Conway)


Marlowe, A. A. H.
Raikes, Sir Victor
Thompson, Kenneth (Walton)


Marshall, Douglas
Rawlinson, Peter
Thompson, Lt.-Cdr. R. (Croydon, S.)


Mathew, R.
Redmayne, M.
Thorneycroft, Rt. Hon. P.


Maude, Angus
Rees-Davies, W. R.
Thornton-Kemsley, C. N.


Maulding, Rt. Hon. R.
Remnant, Hon. P.
Tiley, A. (Bradford, W.)


Mawby, R. L.
Renton, D. L. M.
Turner, H. F. L.


Maydon, Lt.-Comdr. S. L. C.
Ridsdale, J. E.
Turton, Rt. Hon. R. H.


Medlicott, Sir Frank
Rippon, A. G. F.
Tweedsmuir, Lady


Milligan, Rt. Hon. W. R.
Robertson, Sir David
Vane, W. M. F.


Moore, Sir Thomas
Robson-Brown, W.
Vaughan-Morgan, J. K.


Morrison, John (Salisbury)
Roper, Sir Harold
Vickers, Miss Joan


Nabarro, C. D. N.
Ropner, Col. Sir Leonard
Vosper, Rt. Hon. D. F.


Nairn, D. L. S.
Russell, R. S.
Wade, D. W.


Neave, Airey
Sandys, Rt. Hon. D.
Wakefield, Sir Wavell (St. M'lebone)


Nicholls, Harmar
Schofield, Lt.-Col. W.
Walker-Smith, Rt. Hon. D. C.


Nicholson, Godfrey (Farnham)
Scott-Miller, Cmdr. R.
Ward, Rt. Hon. G. R. (Worcester)


Nicolson, N. (D'n'm'th, E. &amp; Chr'ch)
Sharpies, R. C.
Ward, Dame Irene (Tynemouth)


Nugent, G. R. H.
Shepherd, William
Waterhouse, Capt. Rt. Hon. C.


O'Neill, Hn. Phelim (Co. Antrim, N.)
Smitliers, Peter (Winchester)
Watkinson, Rt. Hon. Harold


Ormsby-Gore, Rt. Hon. W. D.
Smyth, Brig. Sir John (Norwood)
Webbe, Sir H.


Orr, Capt. L. P. S.
Spearman, Sir Alexander
Whitelaw, W.S.I. (Penrith &amp; Border)


Orr-Ewing, Charles Ian (Hendon, N.)
Speir, R. M.
Williams, Paul (Sunderland, S.)


Orr-Ewing, Sir Ian (Weston-S-Mare)
Spence, H. R. (Aberdeen, W.)
Williams, R. Dudley (Exeter)


Osborne, C.
Spens, Rt. Hn. Sir P. (Kens'gt'n, S.)
Wills, G. (Bridgwater)


Page, R. G.
Stanley, Capt. Hon. Richard
Wilson, Geoffrey (Truro)


Pannell, N. A. (Kirkdale)
Stevens, Geoffrey
Wood, Hon. R.


Partridge, E.
Steward, Harold (Stookport, S.)
Yates, William (The Wrekin)


Peyton, J. W. W.
Stewart, Henderson (Fife, E.)



Pike, Miss Mervyn
Stoddart-Scott, Col. M.
TELLERS FOR THE AYES:




Mr. Oakshott and Mr. E. Wakefield.




NOES


Ainsley, J. W.
de Freitas, Ceoffrey
Hubbard, T. F.


Albu, A. H.
Delargy, H. J.
Hughes, Cledwyn (Anglesey)


Allaun, Frank (Salford, E.)
Dodds, N. N.
Hughes, Emrys (S. Ayrshire)


Allen, Arthur (Bosworth)
Donnelly, D. L.
Hughes, Hector (Aberdeen, N.)


Allen, Scholefield (Crewe)
Cugdate, Rt. Hn. John (W Brmwch)
Hunter, A. E.


Awbery, S. S.
Dye, S.
Hynd, H. (Accrington)


Bacon, Miss Alice
Ede, Rt. Hon. J. C.
Hynd, J. B. (Attercliffe)


Balfour, A.
Edelman, M.
Irvine, A. J. (Edge Hill)


Bence, C. R. (Dunbartonshire, E.)
Edwards, RE. Hon. John (Grighouse)
Irving, Sydney (Dartford)


Benn, Hn. Wedgwood (Bristol, S.E.)
Edwards, Rt. Hon. Ness (Caerphilly)
Isaacs, Rt. Hon. G. A.


Benson, G.
Edwards, Robert (Bilston)
Janner, B.


Beswick, Frank
Edwards, W. J. (Stepney)
Jay, Rt. Hon. D. P. T.


Blackburn, F.
Evans, Albert (Islington, S.W.)
Jeger, Mrs. Lena(Holbn &amp; St.Pncs.S.)


Blenkinsop, A.
Evans, Edward (Lowestoft)
Jenkins, Roy (Stechford)


Blyton, W. R.
Fernyhough. E.
Johnston, Douglas (Paisley)


Boardman, H.
Fienburgh, W.
Jones, Rt. Hon. A. Creech (Wakefield)


Bowden, H. W. (Leicester, S.W.)
Finch, H. J.
Jones, David (The Hartlepools)


Bowles, F. G.
Fletcher, Eric
Jones, Jack (Rotherham)


Boyd, T. C.
Forttisn, J. C.
Jones, J. Idwal (Wrexham)


Braddock, Mrs. Elizabeth
Gaitskell, Rt. Hon. H. T. N.
Jones, T. W. (Merloneth)


Brockway, A. F.
George, Lady Megan Lloyd
Key, Rt. Hon. C. W.


Broughton, Dr. A. D. D.
Gibson, C. W.
King, Dr. H. M.


Brown, Thomas (Ince)
Gooch, E, G.
Lawson, G. M.


Burke, W. A.
Gordon Walker, Rt. Hon. P. C.
Ledger, R. J.


Burton, Miss F. E.
Greenwood, Anthony
Lee, Frederick (Newton)


Butler, Herbert (Hackney, C.)
Grenfell, Rt. Hon. D. R.
Lee, Miss Jennie (Cannock)


Butler, Mrs. Joyce (Wood Green)

Lever, Leslie (Ardwick)


Callaghan, L. J.
Grey, C. F.
Lewis, Arthur


Carmichael, J.
Griffiths, Rt. Hon. James (Llanelly)
Lindgren, G. S.


Champion, A. J.
Hall, Rt. Hn. Glenvil (Colne Valley)
MacColl, J. E.


Chapman, W. D.
Hamilton, W. W.
MacDermot, Niall


Chetwynd, G. R.
Hannan, W.
McGhee, H. G.


Coldrick, W.
Harrison, J. (Nottingham, N.)
McGovern, J.


Collick, P. H. (Birkenhead)
Hastings, S.
McInnes, J.


Collins, V.J. (Shoreditch &amp; Finsbury)
Hayman, F. H.
McKay, John (Wallsend)


Corbet, Mrs. Freda
Healey, Denis
MacMillan, M. K. (Western Isles)


Cove, W. G.
Henderson, Rt. Hn. A. (Rwly Regis)
MacPherson, Malcolm (Stirling)


Craddock, George (Bradford, S.)
Herbison, Miss M.
Mahon, Simon


Cronin, J. D.
Hewitson, Capt. M.
Mainwaring, W. H.


Cullen, Mrs. A.
Hobson, C. R. (Keighley)
Mallalieu, E. L. (Brigg)


Dalton, Rt. Hon. H.
Holman, P.
Mallalieu, J. P. W. (Huddersfd, E.)


Davies, Harold (Leek)
Howell, Charles (Perry Barr)
Mann, Mrs. Jean


Davies, Stephen (Merthyr)
Howell, Denis (Ail Saints)
Mason, Roy


Deer, G.
Hoy, J. H.
Mayhew, C. P.







Mellish, R. J.
Rankin, John
Thomas, Iorwerth (Rhondda, W.)


Messer, Sir F.
Redhead, E. C.
Thomson, George (Dundee, E.)


Mitchison, G. R.
Reeves, J.
Thornton, E.


Monslow, W.
Reid, William
Timmons, J.


Moody, A. S.
Robens, Rt. Hon. A.
Tomney, F.


Morris, Percy (Swansea, W.)
Roberts, Albert (Normanton)
Ungoed-Thomas, Sir Lynn


Morrison,Rt.Hn.Herbert(Lewis'm,S.)
Roberts, Goronwy (Caernarvon)
Usborne, H. C.


Mort, D. L.
Robinson, Kenneth (St. Pancras, N.)
Viant, S. P.


Moss, R.
Rogers, George (Kensington, N.)
Warbey, W. N.


Moyle, A.
Ross, William
Watkins, T. E.


Mulley, F. W.
Royle, C.
Weitzman, D.


Neal, Harold (Bolsover)
Shinwell, Rt. Hon. E.
Wells, Percy (Faversham)


O'Brien, Sir Thomas
Short, E. W.
Wells, William (Walsall, N.)


Oliver, G. H.
Shurmer, P. L. E.
West, D. G.


Oswald, T.
Silverman, Julius (Aston)
Wheeldon, W. E.


Owen, W. J.
Simmons, C. J. (Brierley Hill)
White, Mrs. Eirene (E. Flint)


Padley, W. E.
Skeffington, A. M.
White, Henry (Derbyshire, N.E.)


Paget, R. T.
Slater, Mrs. H. (Stoke, N.)
Wigg, George


Paling, Rt. Hon. W. (Dearne Valley)
Slater, J. (Sedgefield)
Wilcock, Group Capt, C. A. B.


Palmer, A. M. F.
Smith, Ellis (Stoke, S.)
Wilkins, W. A.


Pannell, Charles (Leeds, W.)
Sorensen, R. W.
Willey, Frederick


Pargiter, G. A.
Soskice, Rt. Hon. Sir Frank
Williams, David (Neath)


Parker, J.
Sparks, J. A.
Williams, Rev. Llywelyn (Ab'tillery)


Parkin, B. T.
Steele, T.
Williams, Ronald (Wigan)


Paton, John
Stewart, Michael (Fulham)
Williams, Rt. Hon. T. (Don Valley)


Pearson, A.
Stonehouse, J. T.
Williams, W. R. (Openshaw)


Peart, T. F.
Stones, W. (Consett)
Williams, W. T. (Barons Court)


Pentland, N.
Strachey, Rt. Hon. J.
Willis, Eustace (Edinburgh, E.)


Plummer, Sir Leslie
Strauss, Rt. Hon. George (Vauxhall)
Wilson, Rt. Hon. Harold (Huyton)


Popplewell, E.
Summerskill, Rt. Hon. E.
Woof, R. E.


Price, Philips (Gloucestershire, W.)
Swingler, S. T.
Yates, V. (Ladywood)


Probert, A. R.
Sylvester, G. O.
Younger, Rt. Hon. K.


Prootor, W. T.
Taylor, Bernard (Mansfield)



Pryde, D. J.
Taylor, John (West Lothian)
TELLERS FOR THE NOES:


Randall, H. E.
Thomas, George (Cardiff)
Mr. Holmes and Mr. J. T. Price.

Mr. SPEAKER then proceeded to put forthwith the Questions on Amendments moved by a member of the Government, of which notice had been given, to that part of the Bill to be concluded at Seven o'clock.

Amendment made: In page 3, line 29, at end insert:

(3) Where the landlord is a body corporate incorporated outside the United Kingdom, the foregoing provisions of this section shall have effect subject to the provisions of Part III of the First Schedule to this Act.—[Mr. Brooke.]

Clause 4.—(ADJUSTMENT AS RESPECTS SERVICES, FURNITURE AND SHARED ACCOMMODATION.)

Amendments made: In page 4, line 7, after "use", insert "of furniture".

In page 4, leave out line 8.—[Mr. H. Brooke.]

Clause 7.—(INCREASE OF CONTROLLED RENTS.)

Mr. James McInnes: I beg to move, in page 6, line 10, after "fulfilled", to insert:
and the maintenance of the dwelling-house in good and tenantable repair is not attributable to the discharge by the tenant of any responsibility incumbent on the landlord".
The Clause provides that where the landlord is responsible for repairs he is entitled to recover an increase of rent of

25 per cent. from the tenant provided that the conditions set out in Section 16 of the Housing (Repairs and Rents) (Scotland) Act, 1954, are fulfilled. The conditions laid down in Section 16 of that Act are that the dwelling-house must be in good and tenantable repair and not in any other respect unfit for human habitation. But there is a paragraph (b) of subsection (1) of that Section which says:
if in accordance with the First Schedule to this Act the landlord has produced satisfactory evidence that work to the value specified in the Schedule has been carried out upon the dwelling-house during the period so specified…
and so on. That paragraph, which has been omitted from the Bill, lays down that the landlord must provide evidence or proof of expenditure incurred in carrying out the repairs. It is very significant that that paragraph has been omitted. We are now giving the landlord a 25 per cent. increase in rent without asking him to produce any evidence or proof of repairs.
In Scotland there are about 700,000 houses to which the 1954 Act applies. That Act was described by our present Prime Minister, who was then Minister of Housing and Local Government, as "Operation Rescue". Let us see what or whom it rescued. Of the 700.000


houses to which the Act applies I find that a little over 2 per cent. had repairs carried out to them. The landlords of those houses received the 40 per cent. increase.
7.15 p.m.
In the light of that fact we are entitled to ask ourselves what reasons prevented the factors and property owners from carrying out more extensive repairs than they have done. I submit that the first reason is that the vast majority of those houses are beyond repair. No amount of money would ever render them fit to he described as in good and tenantable repair. I reckon that there are between 400,000 and 500,000 such houses in Scotland. Indeed, you yourself, Mr. Speaker, have a knowledge of the vast numbers of these tenemental properties in Scotland—these festering slums and blots upon the landscapes of our great cities. These properties are held together by six or seven layers of wallpaper. In fact, if the tenants did rock 'n' roll "the buildings would join them. That is the only way in which I can describe these houses.
The second reason is that the houses which were repairable have been repaired by the tenants themselves. It is common knowledge that tens of thousands of Scots people take great care of and pride in their homes. They have carried out repairs to windows and window sashes; they have carried out plumbing work, or have paid for it to be done; they have installed modern fireplaces, carried out interior decoration and installed electric light—all at their own expense. It was because tenants carried out these repairs themselves that landlords were unable to give any evidence or proof of the expenditure of money upon their houses and were thus unable to qualify for the 40 per cent. increase provided for in the Act.
How have the Government expressed their gratitude to those citizens for taking care of their own homes? They have said, "As your reward we shall give a gift to the landlords of a 25 per cent. increase in rent." Indeed, in Committee the Joint Under-Secretary said that one thing this provision would do would be to stiffen the resistance of citizens and prevent them from repairing their own houses. He made that observation in reply to a point made by my hon. Friend

the Member for Edinburgh, East (Mr. Willis).
The Amendment provides that a landlord would not be allowed this increase where it could be established that his tenant had been entirely responsible for rendering the house in good and tenantable repair. There is nothing unreasonable in the Amendment: it is both reasonable and fair, and I sincerely hope that, upon reflection, the Government will feel disposed to accept it and to recognise that those citizens who take care of and pride in their own homes should be encouraged to do so, and that there should be no reward for the landlords in that respect.

Mr. E. G. Willis: I beg to second the Amendment.
The proposition that has been put forward by my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Central (Mr. McInnes) on this Amendment is quite a simple one. If we take the case of two landlords with comparable properties side by side and neither of whom has done anything to the property, but the tenant of one property has kept it in a good state of repair, his landlord will get a 25 per cent. increase whilst the other landlord will get no increase. Reduced to those terms, it seems quite wrong that one landlord is to benefit as a result of what has been done by the good tenant.
This applies to thousands of houses. The majority of landlords have not kept their houses in a good state of repair. I want to give again the figures for Edinburgh. I gave them during the Committee stage, but they bear repetition. Out of a total of 145,000 houses in Edinburgh roughly 30,000 are owned by local authorities. After deducting those owned by owner-occupiers we have something between 70,000 and 80,000, and of those houses 6,700 are to be demolished. According to Cmd. 9685 there are another 39.000 or 40,000 unfit houses. That means that altogether there must be something like 60 per cent. of the houses recognised by the corporation as unfit.
As I said in the Committee stage, many of those houses will receive the 25 per cent. increase. There are not very many left which were able to qualify for the increase under the 1954 Act. In a great number of cases the landlords were not able to qualify because they had not


kept their houses in that state of repair which would qualify for the 40 per cent. increase, and had not spent the necessary sums in maintaining the houses during the previous two years.
Of those which do not qualify, quite a large number have been kept up by private tenants. As my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Central said, some have been beautifully kept by tenants. Tenants have done all the outside paint-work, the plumbing and interior repairs. Many have added considerably to the value of the property by installing fireplaces. I know of dozens of small homes in my constituency where, out of pride in his own home, a tenant has installed new fireplaces or had electric fittings put in, and, as a result, the value of the house has increased. If the landlord obtains control of such a house as a result of a change of tenancy, as he is entitled to do under Clause 10, he can sell the house for probably £200 or £300 more than he could in the first place.
That is simply as a result of the work done by the tenant. Not satisfied with the increased capital value of the landlord's property, we now say that the landlord is to get 25 per cent, increase if the tenant has done this work. Surely that is quite unfair, quite wrong and unjust. I cannot see how the Joint Under-Secretary can justify it. He could not justify it in Committee. We raised the question in a number of different forms in Committee. If the hon. Gentleman looks at his speeches, he will find that he did not answer this at all. All we are suggesting is that, whatever the merits of the other parts of the Bill, we ought at least in this case to try to treat the tenant fairly.
It is all right to say, "Look at the poor landlord. He has not been getting an increase in rent for a great number of years." That is always the story we get. I addressed a meeting the other night on the Bill. Someone in the meeting said that if we took the case of two men who in 1937 each had £600 and one put £600 into National Savings, that would now be worth about £200, but that if the other built a house and let it, instead of his house being worth £600, today it would be worth £1,800. His house would have been paid for during the intervening period.
How is the landlord so ill-done by? The man who has put his money into

National Savings has been patriotic. He has done what the Government are bribing people to do. The Government are giving special concessions to people to invest in National Savings as opposed to co-operative societies. The man who did that twenty years ago finds that his money is worth only a third of what it was then, but the landlord still has his capital asset. If the tenant has done anything to improve it, the tenant has added to its value. Why should the landlord be entitled to increase the rent?
I sincerely trust that when he replies the Joint Under-Secretary will not content himself, as so often he does, with reading.a brief prepared by civil servants and not answering the questions which have been raised in the debate. It is a favourite dodge of the hon. Gentleman to come here with a brief and never to attempt to answer the arguments put forward. We want some answers to these arguments tonight. I see that the hon. Gentleman is smiling. I hope he is in a good humour, and that he is going to think kindly of the thousands of tenants in Scotland who will suffer as a result of this provision. I hope he will say, "This is a small concession to make. We think it is fair and are prepared to give it to you."

Mr. George Lawson: The Joint Under-Secretary, when a similar point to this was raised in Committee, made an attempt to reply. I do not agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, East (Mr. Willis) in saying that the hon. Gentleman did not reply. He made an attempt to reply, but I think I am fair in saying that his attempt to reply was in saying that the Bill
 is framed on the basis of the respective legal liability for repairs of landlords and tenants, and to depart from the principle in relation to this Measure would create many difficulties in practice."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, Standing Committee A, 6th February, 1957; c. 548.]
We are arguing that the landlord in this case has not fulfilled his legal liabilities, but is to benefit from the efforts of the tenant. It seems that the position which the Bill proposes to make law is that where landlords for many years have defied the law they are to be permitted to benefit from that defiance. A principle on which we in this House should work is that, if possible, no one who defies the law should get away with it. Yet that is


exactly what the Bill as at present drafted allows. The Bill is so drafted that so long as the house is in good and tenantable repair, irrespective of who has maintained it in such repair, the 25 per cent. increase can be claimed.
7.30 p.m.
We have quoted cases. I received information about a party who rented a house in the 1930's. The rent when he took over was £31 and it was immediately raised to £50. Since that time, according to him—I have his name and address—he has paid no less than £300 in repairs. The landlord's attitude was that there would be no repairs. The property, which carries a £50 rent, will be decontrolled, and if it is let to some one else the landlord will be able to obtain a substantially higher rent than would have been the case if the present tenant had allowed the house to fall into disrepair, if the present landlord sells the property, bearing in mind that he will have the right to evict the tenant, he will do so at the enhanced value which the tenant has created.

Mrs. Jean Mann: I think proceedings should be taken against such a landlord. The valuation forms which are sent out contain a clause under which he has to return the rental and it asks whether anything has to be added by way of gratiam or repairs done by the tenant not disclosed in the above particulars. For withholding any payments such as gratiam or withholding the fact that there is an underhand arrangement with the tenant to do the repairs, or for giving false information, that landlord is liable to be proceeded against, and I should have no hesitation in setting the wheels in motion.

Mr. Lawson: I am obliged to my hon. Friend.
That brings me to the second and only other argument used by the Joint Under-Secretary of State when we were seeking to deal with the matter. We were trying to bring about the position which we are seeking to bring about by this Amendment. The hon. Member said it would be impracticable and would produce so many difficulties that it could not be worked.
He knows that there are provisions in the Bill for tenants who have entered into

a legal obligation to undertke a proportion or the whole of the repairs. It seems that where this is known there is no impracticability; it can be done. It seems to me that if it were made an obligation that the landlord should state what he spent on repairs, or give some approximate idea of it, and that the tenant should also state it, then it would become practicable to bring out to what extent, in fact, the landlord had fulfilled his obligations.
The landlords will benefit in very many and probably most of the houses with which we are concerned here. If the landlord can get the 25 per cent. increase he will get it. If he can claim that the house is in good repair, then probably in most cases that will be due to the efforts of the tenant. My hon. Friend pointed out how very few were the landlords who could qualify under the 1954 Act. I think the figure given by the Joint Under-Secretary of State himself was 27,000 houses out of a total of 700.000, which indicates how very few have been the Scottish landlords who have fulfilled their legal obligations to maintain these houses in a state of repair.
The Minister argued on the previous occasion, and will probably argue now, that the tenant is protected by the certificate of disrepair and that if the house is not in a state of repair the rent increase will not be payable. According to the Government, the principal purpose of the Bill is to prevent the decay of houses and to maintain our stock of houses in a proper state of repair. I am sure the Minister will agree that that is one of the chief purposes of the Bill. Yet he himself said previously, and I believe he will say it again, that the tenant's protection is the certificate of disrepair.
In other words, before the Bill becomes operative at all and before any sanction can be applied to the landlord, the purpose of the Bill must be defeated and the house must fall into a state of disrepair. It seems fantastic and illogical that while we are told that the purpose of the Bill is to maintain our stock of houses in a state of repair, in fact the only sanction which the Bill carries in this connection becomes operative only when the house is in disrepair.
The whole logic of this is to induce the tenant to allow the house to fall into


disrepair, that being the only circumstance in which he can bring any pressure to bear on the landlord. That is fantastic, and I hope that the Joint Under-Secretary of State will give us much more reasonable arguments than those when he replies to our Amendment.

Mr. William Ross: I am disappointed that the Minister has not risen to accept the Amendment, because I cannot for the life of me think of any Amendment which could be more reasonable and more in keeping with the spirit of the Clause. As it stands, the Clause gives landlords of rent-restricted property in Scotland the right to raise the rent by 25 per cent. provided certain conditions arc met. One of them is that the conditions justifying a rent increase under the 1954 Act are applicable—that the house is in good and tenatable repair.
If the fact that the house is in good and tenantable repair is due to moneys spent not by the person responsible in law, the landlord, but by the person who occupies the house. surely in all fairness a rent increase which would benefit the landlord who had neglected his duty is unjustified. By the Amendment we are giving the Government a chance to get out of a very difficult situation. This is not only a case of rewarding neglect but also a penalty on the tenants who have preserved a property in the pursuit of a decent life. We have pride in our homes.
I remind the Joint Under-Secretary of State that many of the Scottish Members on this side of the House were born and brought up in this kind of property. I was, at any rate. We practically all were, and we know what we are talking about in this matter. The property in which I was born was the property in which my mother was born, and probably the family had occupied it long before then. These houses are 80 and even over 100 years old.
The actual fact of the matter is simply that the landlords are not here asked to prove that they have spent any money on repairs. That is a good job, because the people who are living in the houses know that the landlords have not spent it. That was argued in Committee and was turned down, so we put forward this even more reasonable suggestion, that where it can be shown that the tenants themselves have

spent the money that brings the house up to the qualifying conditions, no rent increase should apply.
I saw recently—I think following a recent broadcast or television programme which showed conditions in the Gorbals—two photographs in a Scottish paper of the outside surrounding appearance of houses in the Gorbals. No one ever saw anything more damning of private ownership of property. Then the inside of one of those houses was shown. One might have thought it was a flat in one of the better parts of Glasgow. But that was not due to any expenditure of a single penny by the landlord. It was due to this pride in home that the Scots people have, to make the best of what they have, and to do the repairs that the landlords have not been doing.
If one goes into any of these Scottish homes today, in most cases one will find that they have electric light. That was not provided by the landlord but by the tenant. They have modern grates—not provided by the landlord but by the tenant. The same applies to plumbing. The other day I spoke to a lad in Kilmarnock who is just moving into a new house. In the light of what he will be faced with when this Bill goes through, the changes he was making were really fantastic. The old set-in bed—the hole in-the-wall—has in many cases become a little kitchen or scullery, with a gas cooker—the gas cooker also provided at the expense of the tenant.
In the face of such things, here are the Government actually coming with a Clause like this, asking for no proof that money has been spent in repairs, giving no guarantee that rent increases will depend on repairs, and saying to the tenant who has spent this money to keep the house in good and tenantable condition, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant. You have done so well in spending your own money on this house belonging to someone else that we will allow that someone else to raise your rent by 25 per cent."
Can that be justified at all? We worded this Amendment as reasonably as possible so that even a Tory would be able to understand it and agree with it. It does not go nearly as far as we should like, and if the Joint Under-Secretary, representing the Craigtown Division of Glasgow, can stand at that Box and turn


down this Amendment—well, we know that he will be defeated at the next Election, and he will be just making doubly sure that he will no longer occupy a place in this assembly after that Election.

Mr. Hector Hughes: I am glad to see that the Lord Advocate is here to reinforce the Minister because, as we all know, the Lord Advocate has a long experience of the law relating to landlord and tenant, the law of contract, and the law relating to eviction, which has caused so many agonies to tenants and, perhaps, gratification to landlords. I hope that the right hon. and learned Gentleman will bring that long experience to bear upon the consideration of this Amendment.
The Amendment is designed to supply that which is missing from this Clause, to rectify it, arid to ensure what, I am sure, the Lord Advocate would desire—that justice should be done between landlord and tenant. It will be noticed that. as it stands, the Clause deals with the landlord's rights, but not with the co-relative rights of the tenant. In that way it is overweighted in favour of the landlord. The Amendment is clearly designed to rectify those defects.
7.45 p.m.
Clause 7 enables an increase of rents of controlled houses to be made in Scotland. Up to the present, the tenants of those houses have enjoyed a certain measure of protection and security. This Clause is designed to take away that measure of protection and security, and to give to the landlords a right which they did not possess before. The Amendment is designed to poise, to adjust, to balance the iniquities of the Clause so as to take account of the tenants' rights.
As the Clause stands, justice will not be done as between landlord and tenant. It is expressed to enable an increase of rent to be made by the landlord, whether or not he has done anything to keep the house in repair. But the Clause is even worse than that—it goes a little further, and deals with the case where the landlord is under covenant to keep the house in repair and does not do so.
The Amendment takes into account the situation where the landlord, being under an obligation to keep the house in repair and not doing so, the tenant takes over

that responsibility, and does so, not necessarily to enhance the landlord's security, but, no doubt, for his own comfort and security as a tenant. If that happens, the landlord should not be entitled to benefit from it and to derive an advantage from two things; first, the fact that he has not carried out this covenant to repair and to keep in repair, and, secondly, that the tenant has, in fact, taken over the landlord's responsibility, has carried it out and has thereby enhanced the landlord's security.
As the House will see, the Clause as it stands has two enormities. First, it benefits the landlord for not doing that which he is bound to do under covenant. Secondly, it penalises the tenant for enhancing the value of the landlord's property by doing certain repairs to it. Manifestly, that is wrong and unjust, and the Amendment is designed to right that wrong and to remove that injustice.
No doubt this Clause, like the whole of this Bill, arises from the inordinate cost of living under which both landlord and tenant are at present living, but it is manifestly wrong that the cost of living, which weighs heavily on both landlord and tenant, should be used as an excuse to ameliorate and improve the condition of the landlord and to deteriorate and disimprove the position of the tenant. Nevertheless, that is indeed what this Clause does. Therefore, as it stands, it is wrong and requires this Amendment to rectify it.
For the sake of simplicity, may I just refer to the essential words in this Clause in order to enforce my argument? I shall leave out certain words and read the bare skeleton of the Clause. The words I shall read are:
 Where a dwelling-house in Scotland is subject to a controlled tenancy, and the landlord is responsible, … for the repair of the dwelling-house, then, … if and so long as the conditions justifying an increase of rent, … are fulfilled, the rent recoverable from the tenant shall… be increased …
Our Amendment is designed to insert after the word "fulfilled" these words which take account of the rights of the tenant which are completely ignored in the Clause. We seek to insert after the word "fulfilled" the words:
and the maintenance of the dwelling-house in good and tenantable repair is not attributable to the discharge by the tenant of any responsibility incumbent on the landlord".


The Clause, as it stands, will enable the landlord to take advantage of the tenant's work, to take advantage of the fact that the tenant has repaired the premises and has enhanced the landlord's security and capital. This is manifestly wrong. The co-relative is left out of the Clause. The landlord's rights are put in and enforced, while the tenant's rights are left out and ignored. This is plainly injustice.
The Lord Advocate has long experience of the law of landlord and tenant, of the harrowing administration of the Rent Restriction Acts, and this experience, together with his knowledge of the law of contract as between landlord and tenant, will teach him, I have no doubt, to realise that justice demands that the rights of both landlord and tenant should be equipoised and balanced. They are not balanced in the Clause as it stands, but they will be balanced if this beneficial Amendment is accepted.

Mrs. Mann: There have been many contradictions in these Acts in regard to the maintenance of a dwelling-house. If what my hon. Friends have been saying is all true, there are many tenants in Scotland who could raise an action against the owners of property. It is not, perhaps, generally known—it may be that one has to be an owner to know—that every year, in the valuation form which an owner signs on soul and conscience, there appears the rent, and then, in order that no owner may impose other conditions such as a requirement to keep the property in good and habitable repair for the landlord and obtain hidden payments in that way, any arrangement for repair come to between the parties must be declared upon the valuation form. For instance, let us suppose that the rent is £20, but that the tenant, either with or without an understanding, executes £10 worth of repairs a year, that £10 for the landlord ought to be declared to the valuation authority. If the owner has not so declared it, he has committed an offence.
It would appear that these repairs are being carried out, but we must be clear in our minds what is keeping the property in tenantable repair and what is merely an improvement such as improving a grate by taking away an old interior and putting in a new one. That is not considered to be a repair, although it does improve the property. I should like to know what the views are of those tenants

who have actually repaired the pipes instead of sending for a plumber. A tenant of mine just sends for the plumber; he never consults me. He sends for the builder and the others. Where that is done and a tenant bears the cost himself, there is no occasion whatever for charging him the extra 25 per cent.
I find another contradiction in the Act of 1954. In that Measure the Government went to the extreme of insisting on a two-fifths expenditure by the owner before any increase was to be permitted whereas in the Bill they have gone to the opposite extreme and are permitting by this Clause a 25 per cent. increase without the landlord having to fulfil any condition as regards maintaining the dwelling-house in good and tenantable repair.
Since 1923, when the Rent Restriction Act permitted a 47½ per cent. increase in Scotland, there has been a feeling of grievance among tenants. That 47½ per cent. permitted 15 per cent. in respect of extra interest and mortgage charges, etc., 25 per cent. in respect of repairs, and 7½ per cent. in respect of increasing owners' rates. The grievance was that the condition attached to the 25 per cent. in respect of repairs was never adhered to. The money was lifted, but it was never spent on repairs. We are now trying to redress that grievance, and I hope that our Amendment will be accepted.

The Joint Under-Secretary of State for Scotland (Mr. J. Nixon Browne): I will deal, first of all, with one or two points which have been raised before dealing with the main issue. The hon. Member for Kilmarnock (Mr. Ross) spoke about the Gorbals houses. I have seen them myself. I used to tell the hon. Lady the Member for the Gorbals (Mrs. Cullen) that the houses in Govan were as bad as they were in the Gorbals, but when I had seen them I had to admit that these were worse. Surely, the hon. Member for Kilmarnock cannot believe that the Bill would affect that kind of house. It cannot possibly do so.

Mr. Ross: Why not?

Mr. Browne: Because such a house would never qualify for other than a certificate of disrepair.

Mr. Ross: Are we to understand that all the houses in the Gorbals have got certificates of disrepair?

Mr. Browne: No, but I am referring to houses of the type which he was describing to the House. I am sure the hon. Gentleman would not want to make a case on a false premise, and it is quite wrong to base anything——

Mr. Willis: Surely, the hon. Gentleman will not——

Mr. Browne: Will the hon. Gentleman let me finish? No such point against this Bill can be argued on that type of house, which the Glasgow Corporation is trying to pull down.

Mr. Willis: There is no certificate of disrepair unless the tenant applies for it. We discussed all this at great length in Committee, and the hon. Gentleman must know that a great many of the people who live in these houses know nothing about certificates of disrepair or applying for them, or anything of that sort.

Mr. Browne: But a tenant has not got to apply for a certificate of disrepair unless the landlord asks for an increase. I am sure that nobody who knows the area can conceive of any landlord asking for an increase for that type of house.

Mr. Willis: Of course we can.

Mr. Ross: May I make it clear that I addressed myself entirely to the point of considering whether the conditions justifying the increase had been fulfilled. I did not refer to these houses in the Gorbals at all. In fact, my reference to the Gorbals was only to a house which was in good condition because of the efforts of the tenant.

Mr. Browne: If I have taken the hon. Gentleman up wrongly, I apologise. I shall see in HANSARD tomorrow what it was he said.
The hon. Member for Glasgow, Central (Mr. McInnes) said that a little over 2 per cent. of our Scottish houses had been repaired under the 1954 Act. The hon. Gentleman is unlikely to put himself in the position of being corrected by his hon. Friend the Member for Motherwell (Mr. Lawson), but the hon. Member for Motherwell knows the correct figure at the latest convenient date, which is 27,000 out of 700,000, not 2 per cent., but between 3 and 4 per cent. [Interruption.] Well, it is nearly twice as much.

Mr. Willis: "Operation Rescue."

Mr. Browne: It was a little rescue.

Mr. Willis: Very little.

8.0 p.m.

Mr. Browne: The hon. Member for Motherwell saw something ridiculous in the certificate of disrepair procedure. I did my best to try to follow him. Surely, the best system for getting our Scottish houses put into and kept in repair is the carrot of a rent increase and the stick of a certificate of disrepair to take it away if the house is not fit. I could not follow the hon. Member's argument at all.
The hon. Lady the Member for Coat-bridge and Airdrie (Mrs. Mann) had in mind the doubt that is in the minds of many of us in connection with the Amendment. In discussing the Amendment, it is important to appreciate the type of repair that is necessary to bring a house into good and tenantable repair and fitness for human habitation. No doubt, a good many Scottish tenants have spent quite a deal of money on their houses——

Mr. Ross: They certainly have.

Mr. Browne: —but most of the money has been spent—we have all done this—on minor repairs and improvements for the tenant's own comfort and convenience. [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."] The hon. Member for Glasgow, Central talked about wallpaper keeping the houses from falling down. Really, he knows that wallpaper is not the responsibility of the landlord and that many of these repairs done by the tenant fall into disrepair in a comparatively short number of years. Such repairs may, indeed, have improved the house as a pleasant dwelling-house. The tenant has spent money on them and has enjoyed, and is enjoying, the results of his expenditure. That is what money is for.
My point is that even if this money had not been spent by the tenant, even if many of these repairs—I am not saying all of them—had not been done, the house still might be in good repair and fit for human habitation.

Mr. Willis: It is very doubtful.

Mr. Browne: In a typical, well-maintained Scottish property—[Interruption.] Yes, there are well-maintained Scottish properties, far more of them than this debate would lead one to think.

Mr. McInnes: Monuments in the cemetery.

Mr. Ross: Even they are not in good repair.

Mr. Browne: I credit the hon. Member for Glasgow, Central, who is a constituent of mine, with knowing far more about housing conditions in Scotland than one would imagine after reading his speech. In typical well-maintained Scottish houses, the landlord regularly carries out the more costly repairs—[HON. MEMBERS: "No."]—to which no reference has been made in this instance—repairs to the fabric of the building, to the roof, to the common property, the stairs and the entries. That is big money that the landlord has spent and for which the tenant has had no responsibility whatever.

Mr. Ross: Why only 3 per cent. in the 1954 Act?

Mr. Browne: That is one of the reasons for the Clauses that we are now discussing.
The Amendment does not, therefore, alter the position either for the good landlord or for the industrious tenant such as I have described.

Mrs. Alice Cullen: Does the hon. Gentleman know of good landlords?

Mr. Browne: Yes——

Mrs. Cullen: I do not.

Mr. Browne: —good and helpful landlords. There may be cases where the tenant, of his own volition, has done some repairs that should legally have been carried out by the landlord—that is true. It would be very unusual if the landlord himself had not also done as much as he could afford to do in the house.

Mrs. Mann: The hon. Gentleman is confusing the matter of landlordism in Scotland. The individual landlord is usually quite fair, but we are not dealing with individual landlords. We are dealing with vast agents who own great parts of Glasgow and in whom the individual touch is completely missing.

Mr. Browne: I have no experience except of Scottish landlords and I have found that these big companies have been extremely helpful and, in a great many

cases, have done a great deal to try to keep the houses in repair under extremely difficult conditions.
The very fact that one tenant may have done something that the landlord should have done does not mean that the landlord has done nothing. Very often, he has done all he could afford to do. I agree that a few have failed to do what they ought to have done, but it would be difficult in legislation to pick out those few who have failed to do what they ought to have done and who could have afforded to do it. If the landlord had not done some work, the house by now would be in such a state of disrepair, normally speaking, that any idea of obtaining an increase in rent would be quite out of the question.

Mr. Willis: Really.

Mr. Browne: It is true.

Mr. McInnes: The hon. Gentleman is deliberately ignoring the kernel of the problem. We confess that 400,000 or 500,000 houses are not in good and tenantable repair in Scotland, leaving another 300,000 or 400,000 houses that are in good and tenantable repair. Why, then, have only 27,000 of them been repaired by the landlords? What is the explanation for the difference? If the hon. Gentleman wants the answer, it is obvious that the tenants themselves have done all the repairs.

Mr. Browne: Oh, no. First, the landlords had not the money to do the repairs, and, secondly——

Mr. Willis: What did they do with it?

Mr. Browne: —the grave deterrent of going back to the 1914 rent made it not worth the landlord's while to do it at all. That, however, is the subject of a later Amendment, and if I can get on we might be able to reach that Amendment.
One of the main reasons for the Bill is that if we are to have houses put into repair, and, what is more, kept in repair, the rent must be reasonably adequate, In spite of everything that has been said, I do not believe that the average Scottish tenant is opposed to paying a slightly higher rent for a good house. [Interruption.] The maximum rent increase that we are discussing is 3s. 10d. a week and the average rent increase is less than 2s. a week. I say again that where the


tenant has helped the landlord in the past by doing some of the basic repairs which the landlord should have carried out, I would expect the tenant's attitude to harden to the extent of expecting the landlord to carry out his obligations.

Mr. Willis: There is nothing in the Bill about it.

Mr. Browne: People are human, if the landlord wants his increased rent to continue——

Mr. Willis: The hon. Gentleman is saying something with which we on this side have not so far disagreed. He is putting up an Aunt Sally to knock down himself. He suggests that the tenant does not mind paying 2s. a week more provided he gets the repairs done. We have not disagreed with that. All we have suggested is that where the landlord is not doing the repairs, the tenant should not pay the 2s. Where the tenant is paying for the repairs, he should not have to pay twice, in the rent and in the repairs. Secondly, where in the Bill is there any guarantee that the money will be used to keep the premises in repair?

Mr. Browne: Had the hon. Member been listening, he would know I had been addressing myself to the difficulty of drawing a dividing line between one type of property and another. The hon. Member asks where in the Bill there is anything to say that the money has to be spent on the house. Surely, he knows that if money is not spent on the house, it will deteriorate and that if the landlord fails to spend money on the house, he will no longer qualify for the increased rent.

Mrs. Cullen: That is because of the deterioration.

Mr. Browne: Whether the landlord is responsible wholly or in part for the repairs is a legal question. It depends on the terms of the contract, but under Section 23 of the Housing (Repairs and Rents) (Scotland) Act, 1954, applied to the 1957 Act increase by Clause 8 of the Bill, unless the tenant is under express liability to carry out repairs, the landlord is deemed wholly responsible for them. The hon. Member for Motherwell made a significant point. He said that the landlords had evaded the law over the years. Surely, is it not the duty of the

House, if such conditions have applied, to create new conditions to stop that state of affairs? If the Rent Restriction Acts have had that effect, is it not our job as the House of Commons to put the matter right?

Mr. Ross: By giving the landlords an extra 25 per cent. rent?

Mr. Lawson: We are trying to settle into the Clause a provision that where the repairs are carried out by the tenant the landlords shall not benefit. That is what we are trying to do.

Mr. Browne: So are we, but we disagree with the hon. Member that he has the best way of doing it.
he Amendment seeks to relieve the tenant of the consequences of something he may have done but has not contracted to do.

Mr. Ross: Not "may."

Mr. Browne: All right then, something he did that he did not contract to do, but landlords under the Bill have better conditions and more means and more incentive to fulfil their obligations. Furthermore, it would be in practice very difficult to define and explain to the satisfaction of the tenant, and certainly to the satisfaction of hon. Members opposite, the correct dividing line between those repairs which the landlord should have done and those which do not fall into that category. I have tried to answer all the points and I am sure that after such a clear exposition of what is wrong with the Amendment the Opposition will consider withdrawing it.

Mr. Douglas Johnston: I feel that my hon. Friends will regret not only the reply but the reasons advanced for the reply, because, having listened to the Joint Under-Secretary with some care, I find that four-fifths of his reply did not in any way relate to the Amendment.

Mr. Browne: It is very difficult for me, because if I replied to the Amendment only I should not be able to reply to the speeches, and hon. Members would have something then to complain about.

Mr. Johnston: The hypothesis on which the proposed Amendment proceeds is that the house is in good and tenantable repair. All it seeks to do is to provide that if the tenant has been the means by


which the house has been kept in good and tenantable repair, he shall be rewarded for that rather than that the landlord should be rewarded. I am sure that the Joint Under-Secretary appreciates that.
Surely, it is wholly inequitable that a landlord should be entitled to this 25 per cent. increase in rent if the increase is not due to his fulfilling his legal obligation to keep the house in tenantable repair but is the result of the tenant fulfilling the landlord's obligation. I feel sure that the Joint Under-Secretary will agree that that is an inequitable result. If it is inequitable, why not provide that the landlord shall not receive that increase?

Mr. Browne: Would the hon. and learned Member address himself to the point that the landlord has to keep the house in good repair also?

8.15 p.m.

Mr. Johnston: I concede, of course, that the landlord is under an obligation, but the hypothesis of the argument is that he has not fulfilled that obligation in the past and there is no express obligation upon him to do so in the future. The hon. Gentleman might reply that there is and that the sanction, if the landlord does not keep the house in good repair, is the sanction of a certificate of disrepair.

Mr. Browne: Mr. Browne indicated assent.

Mr. Johnston: I notice that the hon. Gentleman nods his head, but he knows as well as I do that the certificate of disrepair procedure has been in existence since the Increase of Rent and Mortgage Interest (Restrictions) Act, 1919. It has not worked for various reasons. One reason is that the tenants have not known about it. The second is that in many cases tenants have been afraid to operate it. A third reason is that landlords have said, "We can do what we like. We do not intend to make the repairs." It is in those circumstances that the tenant has undertaken the repairs which were the obligation of the landlord, with the result that the house is now in good and tenantable repair, and that if the Amendment be not accepted the reward will go to the landlord rather than to the tenants.
I submit that that is a wholly inequitable result. I understand that the only

justification put forward for it is that it is administratively difficult to decide what would be the landlord's repairs and what would be the tenant's, and that in those circumstances we have just got to put up with the inequity. That reply, of course, is not satisfactory, because there is already a provision in subsection (4) of the Clause that any question arising as to whether the landlord was responsible for repair or whether it was the tenant's responsibility shall be decided, in the event of there being no agreement between them, by the sheriff. That Clause is very apt to decide the very point now put forward in the Amendment, which is who in fact did the repairs that kept the house in being and in good an tenantable condition. It is a pure question of fact which could easily be decided by the sheriff.

Mr. Browne: Mr. Browne indicated dissent.

Mr. Johnston: Why not? Why should it not be possible to decide who repaired the roof, who repaired the rone pipes, who put the new window in and who supplied new sashes? Suppose that a landlord went to the court and said, "It is true that I have not done any repairs in the last thirty years", as many landlords have not done, and the tenant were able to say, "I paid Mr. X and Mr. Y, the tradesmen who carried out the repairs to the roof and to the rone pipes."

Mr. Browne: Mr. Browne indicated dissent.

Mr. Johnston: The hon. Gentleman shakes his head. It is not enough to shake his head. He must give reasons.

Mr. Browne: The hon. and learned Member raises so many doubts about whether the landlord or the tenant repaired the roof or the rone pipes and so on. How would one put all that into legislation?

Mr. Johnston: I should have thought that that was a question of fact and that if the landlord was unable to prove that he had carried out the repairs he could not be entitled to the increase in rent. The courts are accustomed to carry out investigations of facts as complicated and, indeed, somewhat more complicated every day. This is a matter of fact very capable of being decided by the sheriff. It is just as capable of being decided by him as those questions which are remitted to him under subsection (4) of this very


Clause. I do not accept an administrative difficulty which is a pure figment of the imagination of the Joint Under-Secretary as being a good excuse for committing what is obviously an inequity on the tenant.
I should have thought that a still better reason for accepting the Amendment was this. It is, as I understand it, the Government's policy behind this Bill that repairs should be completed to houses. I take it that that is their view. It really does not very much matter to anyone who does these repairs. What is important is that the repairs should be done——

Mr. Browne: And continue to be done.

Mr. Johnston: —and continue to be done. It is quite clear from the past history of housing in Scotland that very few landlords will do repairs. There are various reasons for that, and I do not think that the fact that rents are to be increased would encourage landlords to do any more repairs than they have done in the past, or have done under the 1954 Act. I think that is quite clear. It would, however, encourage tenants to do the repairs if they knew that if, as a result of doing the repairs, they were not to be penalised, but, under the provisions of this Clause as unamended, they are to be penalised, because they are to have their rents increased.
I should have thought that in these circumstances the Government would

have accepted this Amendment with alacrity and enthusiasm, because it does follow what we understand are the basic ideas behind this Clause, and I regret very much that the Government will not do so. I can only hope that they will think again, and that the Joint Under-Secretary will now get up and say that he will reconsider the matter because he is unwilling that an injustice should be done to tenants and is anxious that houses should be put in repair. I notice that the hon. Gentleman shakes his head. I can only assume from that that what he is most anxious to do is what I have long suspected—not to keep houses in repair, but to provide another 25 per cent. for landlords under this Clause, irrespective of what is done at all. The hon. Gentleman knows quite well, as I know, that very few landlords will spend money on houses, and that still fewer tenants will risk the displeasure of their landlords by seeking to get certificates of disrepair.

For myself, I can only regard this Clause, unless it be amended in the way I have suggested, as a gift of another 25 per cent. to landlords, in the same way as there was a gift of some 40 per cent. under the 1919 Act.

Question put, That those words be there inserted in the Bill:—

The House divided: Ayes 231, Noes 269.

Division No. 84.]
AYES
[8.22 p.m.


Ainsley, J. W.
Butler, Mrs. Joyce (Wood Green)
Edelman, M.


Albu, A. H.
Callaghan, L. J.
Edwards, Rt. Hon. John (Brighouse)


Aliaun, Frank (Salford, E.)
Carmichael, J.
Edwards, Rt. Hon. Ness (Caerphilly)


Allen, Arthur (Bosworth)
Castle, Mrs. B. A.
Edwards, Robert (Bilston)


Allen, Scholefield (Crewe)
Champion, A. J.
Edwards, W. J. (Stepney)


Awbery, S. S.
Chapman, W. D.
Evans, Albert (Islington, S.W.)


Bacon, Miss Alice
Chetwynd, G. R.
Evans, Edward (Lowestoft)


Baird, J.
Coldrick, W.
Fernyhough, E.


Balfour, A.
Collick, P. H. (Birkenhead)
Frenburgh, W.


Bellenger, Rt. Hon. F. J.
Collins, V. J. (Shoreditch &amp; Finsbury)
Finch, H. J.


Bence C. R. (Dunbartonshire, E.)
Corbet, Mrs. Freda
Fletcher, Eric


Benn, Hrt. Wedgwood (Bristol, S.E.)
Cove, W. G.
Forman, J. C.


Benson, G.
Craddock, George (Bradford, S.)
George, Lady Megan Lloyd


Beswick, Frank
Cronin, J. D.
Gibson, C. W.


Blackburn, F.
Crossman, R. H. S.
Goooh, E. G.


Blenkinsop, A.
Cullen, Mrs. A.
Greenwood, Anthony


Blyton, W. R.
Dalton, Rt. Hon. H.
Grenfell, Rt. Hon. D. R.


Boardman, H.
Davies, Ernest (Enfield, E.)
Grey, C. F.


Bowden, H. W. (Leicester, S.W.)
Davies, Harold (Leek)
Griffiths, Rt. Hon. James (Llanelly)


Bowles, F. G.
Davies, Stephen (Merthyr)
Hall, Rt. Hn. Glenvil (Colne Valley)


Boyd, T. C.
Deer, G.
Hamilton, W. W.


Braddock, Mrs. Elizabeth
de Freitas, Geoffrey
Hannan, W.


Brockway, A. F.
Delargy, H. J.
Harrison, J. (Nottingham, N.)


Brown, Rt. Hon. George (Belper)
Dodds, N. N.
Hastings, S.


Brown, Thomas (Ince)
Donnelly, D. L.
Hayman, F. H.


Burke, W. A.
Dugdale, Rt. Hn. John (W. Brmwch)
Healey, Denis


Burton, Miss F. E.
Dye, S.
Henderson, Rt. Hn. A. (Rwly Regis)


Butler, Herbert (Hackney, C.)
Ede, Rt. Hon. J. C.
Herbison, Miss M.




Hobson, C. R. (Keighley)
Mellish, R. J.
Simmons, C. J. (Brierley Hill)


Holman, P.
Messer, Sir F.
Slater, Mrs. H. (Stoke, N.)


Holmes, Horace
Mitchison, G. R.
Slater, J. (Sedgefield)


Howell, Charles (Perry Barr)
Monslow, W.
Smith, Ellis (Stoke, S.)


Howell, Denis (All Saints)
Moody, A. S.
Sorensen, R. W.


Hoy, J. H.
Morris, Percy (Swansea, W.)
Soskice, Rt. Hon. Sir Frank


Hubbard, T. F.
Morrison, Rt.Hn. Herbert (Lewis'm.S.)
Sparks, J. A.


Hughes, Cledwyn (Anglesey)
Mort, D. L.
Steele, T.


Hughes, Emrys (S. Ayrshire)
Moss, R.
Stewart, Michael (Fulham)


Hughes, Hector (Aberdeen, N.)
Moyle, A.
Stonehouse, J. T.


Hunter, A. E.
Mulley, F. W.
Stones, W. (Consett)


Hynd, H. (Accrington)
Neal, Harold (Bolsover)
Strachey, Rt. Hon. J.


Irvine, A. J. (Edge Hill)
Noel-Baker, Rt. Hon. P. (Derby, S.)
Summerskill, Rt. Hon. E.


Irving, Sydney (Dartford)
O'Brien, Sir Thomas
Swingler, S. T.


Isaacs, Rt. Hon. G. A.
Oliver, G. H.
Sylvester, G. O.


Janner, B.
Orbach, M.
Taylor, Bernard (Mansfield)


Jay, Rt. Hon. D. P. T.
Oswald, T.
Taylor, John (West Lothian)


Jeger, George (Goole)
Owen, W. J.
Thomas, George (Cardiff)


Jeger, Mrs. Lena(Holbn &amp; St.Pncs.S.)
Padley, W. E.
Thomas, Iorwerth (Rhondda, W.)


Jenkins, Roy (Stechford)
Paget, R. T.
Thomson, George (Dundee, E.)


Johnston, Douglas (Paisley)
Paling, Rt. Hon. W. (Dearne Valley)
Thornton, E.


Jones, Rt. Hon. A. Creech (Wakefield)
Palmer, A. M. F.
Timmons, J.


Jones, David (The Hartlepools)
Panneil, Charles (Leeds, W.)
Ungoed-Thomas, Sir Lynn


Jones, Jack (Rotherham)
Pargiter, G. A.
Viant, S. P.


Jones, J. Idwal (Wrexham)
Parker, J.
Warbey, W. N.


Jones, T. W. (Merioneth)
Parkin, B. T.
Watkins, T. E.


Key, Rt. Hon. C. W.
Paton, John
Weitzman, D.


King, Dr. H. M.
Peart, T. F.
Wells, Percy (Faversham)


Lawson, G. M.
Pentland, N.
Wells, William (Walsall, N.)


Ledger, R. J.
Plummer, Sir Leslie
West, D. G.


Lee, Frederick (Newton)
Popplewell, E.
Wheeldon, W. E.


Lee, Miss Jennie (Cannock)
Price, Philips (Gloucestershire, W.)
White, Mrs. Eirene (E. Flint)


Lever, Leslie (Ardwick)
Probert, A. R.
White, Henry (Derbyshire, N.E.)


Lewis, Arthur
Proctor, W. T.
Wigg, George


Lindgren, G. S.
Pryde, D. J.
Wilcock, Group Capt. C. A. B.


MacColl, J. E.
Randall, H. E.
Wilkins, W. A.


McGhee, H. G.
Rankin, John
Willey, Frederick


McGovern, J.
Redhead, E. C.
Williams, David (Neath)


Mclnnes, J.
Reeves, J.
Williams, Rev. Llywelyn (Ab'tillery)


McKay, John (Wallsend)
Reid, William
Williams, Ronald (Wigan)


MacDermot, Niall
Robens, Rt. Hon. A.
Williams, Rt. Hon. T. (Don Valley)


MacMillan, M. K. (Western Isles)
Roberts, Goronwy (Caernarvon)
Williams, W. R. (Openshaw)


MacPherson, Malcolm (Stirling)
Robinson, Kenneth (St. Panoras, N.)
Williams, W. T. (Barons Court)


Mahon, Simon
Rogers, George (Kensington, N.)
Willis, Eustace (Edinburgh, E.)


Mainwaring, W. H.
Ross, William
Woof, R. E.


Mallalieu, E. L. (Brigg)
Royle, C.
Yates, V. (Ladywood)


Mallalieu, J. P. W. (Huddersfd, E.)
Shinwell, Rt. Hon. E.
Younger, Rt. Hon. K.


Mann, Mrs. Jean
Short, E. W.



Mason, Roy
Shurmer, P. L. E.
TELLERS FOR THE AYES:


Mayhew, C. P.
Silverman, Julius (Aston)
Mr. J. T. Price and Mr. Pearson.




NOES


Agnew, Sir Peter
Bossom, Sir Alfred
Dance, J. C. G.


Aitken, W. T.
Bowen, E. R. (Cardigan)
Davidson, Viscountess


Allan, R. A. (Paddington, S.)
Boyd-Carpenter, Rt. Hon. J. A.
Deedes, W. F.


Alport, C. J. M.
Boyle, Sir Edward
Digby, Simon Wingfield


Amery, Julian (Preston, N.)
Braine, B. R.
Doughty, C. J. A.


Amory, Rt. Hn. Heathcoat (Tiverton)
Braithwaite, Sir Albert (Harrow, W.)
du Cann, E. D. L.


Anstruther-Gray, Major Sir William
Brooke, Rt. Hon. Henry
Dugdale, Rt. Hn. Sir T. (Richmond)


Arbuthnot, John
Browne, J. Nixon (Craigton)
Duncan, Capt. J. A. L.


Armstrong, C. W.
Bryan, P.
Duthie, W. S.


Ashton, H.
Bullus, Wing Commander E. E.
Eden, J. B. (Bournemouth, West)


Astor, Hon. J. J.
Butcher, Sir Herbert
Elliot, Rt. Hon. W. E.


Atkins, H. E.
Butler, Rt. Hn. R. A. (Saffron Walden)
Emmet, Hon. Mrs. Evelyn


Baldock, Lt.-Cmdr. J. M.
Campbell, Sir David
Farey-Jones, F. W.


Baldwin, A. E.
Carr, Robert
Fell, A.


Balniel, Lord
Cary, Sir Robert
Finlay, Graeme


Barber, Anthony
Channon, Sir Henry
Fisher, Nigel


Barter, John
Chichester-Clark, R.
Fletcher-Cooke, C.


Baxter, Sir Beverley
Clarke, Brig. Terence (Portsmth, W.)
Fort, R.


Beamish, Maj. Tufton
Conant, Maj. sir Roger
Fraser, Sir Ian (M'ombe &amp; Lonsdair)


Bell, Ronald (Bucks, S.)
Cooke, Robert
Freeth, Denzil


Bennett, F. M, (Torquay)
Cooper, A. E.
Garner-Evans, E. H.


Bennett, Dr. Reginald
Cooper-Key, E. M,
George, J. C. (Pollok)


Bevins, J. R. (Toxteth)
Cordeaux, Lt.-Col. J. K.
Gibson-Watt, D.


Bidgood, J. C.
Corfield, Capt. F. V.
Godber, J. B.


Biggs-Davison, J. A.
Craddock, Beresford (Spelthome)
Gomme-Duncan, Col. Sir Alan


Birch, Rt. Hon. Nigel
Crouch, R. F.
Goodhart, P. C.


Bishop, F. P.
Crowder, Sir John (Finchley)
Cower, H. R.


Black, C. W.
Crowder, Petre (Ruislip—Northwood)
Graham, Sir Fergus


Body, R. F.
Cunningham, Knox
Green, A,


Boothby, Sir Robert
Currie, G. B. H.
Gresham Cooke, R.







Grimond, J.
Leburn, W. G
Raikes, Sir Victor


Grimston, Hon. John (St. Albans)
Legge-Bourke, Maj. E. A. H
Rawlinson, Peter


Grimston, Sir Robert (Westbury)
Legh, Hon. Peter (Petersfleld)
Redmayne, M.


Crsvenor, Lt.-Col. R. G.
Lindsay, Hon. James (Devon, N.)
Rees-Davies, W. R


Gurden, Harold
Linstead, Sir H. N.
Remnant, Hon. P


Hall, John (Wycombe)
Llewellyn, D. T
Renton, D. L. M


Hare, Rt. Hon. J. H
Lloyd, Maj. Sir Guy (Renfrew, E)
Ridsdale, J. E


Harris, Frederic (Croydon, N.W.)
Low, Rt. Hon. A. R. W.
Rippon, A. G. F.


Harris, Rader (Heston)
Lucas, Sir Jocelyn (Portsmouth, S.)
Robson-Brown, W


Harrison, A. B. C. (Maldon)
Lucas, P. B. (Brentford &amp; Chiswick)
Roper, Sir Harold


Harrison, Col. J. H. (Eye)
Lucas-Tooth, Sir Hugh
Ropner, Col. Sir Leonard


Harvey, Air Cdre. A. V (Macclesfd)
McAdden, S. J
Russell, R. S.


Harvey, Ian (Harrow, E.)
Macdonald, Sir Peter
Sandys, Rt. Hon. D.


Harvey, John (Walthamstow, E.)
Mackeson, Brig. Sir Harry
Schofield, Lt.-Col. W.


Harvey-Watt, Sir George
Maokie, J. H. (Galloway)
Scott-Miller, Cmdr. R.'


Hay, John
McLaughlin, Mrs. P
Sharpies, R. C


Heaid, Rt. Hon. Sir Lionel
McLean, Neil (Inverness)
Shepherd, William


Heath, Rt. Hon. E. R. G.
MacLeod, John (Ross &amp; Cromarty)
Smithers, Peter (Winchester)


Henderson, John (Cathcart)
Macmillan, Maurice (Halifax)
Smyth, Brig. Sir John (Norwood)


Heskcth, R. F
Macpherson, Niall (Dumfries)
Spearman, Sir Alexander


Hicks-Beach, Maj. W. W
Maddan, Martin
Speir, R. M


Hill, Rt. Hon. Charles (Luton)
Maitland, Cdr. J. F. W. (Horncastle)
Spens, Rt. Hn. Sir P. {Kons'gt'n, S)


Hill, Mrs. E. (Wythenshawe)
Maitland, Hon. Patrick (Lanark)
Stanley, Capt. Hon. Richard


Hill, John (S. Norfolk)
Manningham-Buller, Rt. Hn. Sir R
Stevens, Geoffrey


Hinchingbrooke, Viscount
Marlowe, A. A. H.
Steward, Harold (Stockport, S.)


Hobson, J. G. S (War'ck &amp; Leam'gtn)
Marshall, Douglas
Stewart, Sir James Henderson (Fife,E,)


Holland-Martin, C. J
Mathew, R.
Storey, S


Hope, Lord John
Maude, Angus
Stuart, Rt. Hon. James (Moray)


Hornby, R. P
Mawby, R. L
Studholme, Sir Henry


Horobin, Sir lan
Maydon, Lt.-Comdr, S. L. C.
Summers, Sir Spencer


Horsbrugh, Rt. Hon. Dame Florence
Medlicott, Sir Frank
Taylor, Sir Charles (Eastbourne)


Howard, Hon. Greville (St. lves)
Mllligan, Rt. Hon. W. R
Temple, John M.


Howard, John (Test)
Molson, Rt. Hon. Hugh
Thomas, P. J. M. (Conway)


Hughes Hallett, Vice-Admiral J
Moore, Sir Thomas
Thompson, Kenneth (Walton)


Hughes-Young, M. H. C
Morrison, John (Salisbury)
Thornton-Kemsley, C. N


Hulbert, Sir Norman
Mott-Radclyffe, Sir Charles
Tiley, A. (Bradford, W.)


Hutchison, Sir lan Clark (E'b'gh, W.)
Nabarro, G. D. N.
Turner, H. F. L.


Hutchison, Sir James (Scotstoun)
Nairn, D. L. S
Turton, Rt. Hon. R. H.


Hyde, Montgomery
Neave, Airey
Tweedsmuir, Lady


Hylton-Foster, Rt, Hon. Sir Harry
Nicholls, Harmar
Vane, W. M. F


lremonger, T. L.
Nicholson, Godfrey (Farnham)
Vaughan-Morgan, J. K


lrvine, Bryant Godman (Rye)
Nioolson, N. (B'n'm'th, E. &amp; Chr'ch)
Viokers, Miss Joan


Jenkins, Robert (Dulwich)
Noble, Comdr. A. H. P
Vosper, Rt. Hon. D. F.


Jennings, J. C. (Burton)
Nugent, G. R. H.
Wade, D. W.


Johnson, Dr. Donald (Carlisle)
Oakshott, H. D
Wakefield, Edward (Derbyshire, W.)


Johnson, Eric (Blackley)
O'Neill, Hn. Phelim (Co. Antrim, N.)
Wakefield, Sir Wavell (St. M'lebone)


Johnson, Howard (Kemptown)
Ormsby-Gore, Rt. Hon. W. D
Walker-Smith, Rt. Hon. D. C


Joseph, Sir Keith
Orr, Capt. L. P. S.
Ward, Rt. Hon. G. R. (Worcester)


Joynson-Hicks, Hon. Sir Lancelot
Orr-Ewing, Charles Ian (Hendon, N.)
Waterhouse, Capt. Rt. Hon. C.


Kaberry, D.
Osborne, C
Webbe, Sir H


Keegan, D.
Page, R. C
Whitelaw, W.S.I (Penrith &amp; Border)


Kerby, Capt. H. B.
Pannell, N. A. (Kirkdale)
Williams, Paul (Sunderland, S.)


Kerr, H. W
Partridge, E
Williams, R. Dudley (Exeter)


Kershaw, J. A.
Peyton, J. W. W.
Wills, G. (Bridgwater)


Kimball, M.
Pike, Miss Mervyn
Wilson, Geoffrey (Truro)


Kirk, P. M
Pilkington, Capt. R. A.
Wood, Hon. R


Lagden, G. W
Pitt, Miss E. M.
Yates, William (The Wrekin)


Lambert, Hon. G
Pott, H. P



Lancaster, Col. C. G
Powell, J. Enoch
TELLERS FOR THE NOES:


Langford-Holt, J. A.
Price, Henry (Lewlsham, W.)
Mr. R. Thompson and


Leavey, J. A.
Prior-Palmer, Brig. O. L
Mr. Brooman-White

Clause 10—(RELEASE FROM CONTROL NDER RENT ACTS.)

Mr. H. Brooke: I beg to move, in page 8, line 38, to leave out from the beginning, to "the" in line 39.
In the Standing Committee on the Bill an Amendment was carried against my advice, the effect of which would have been to prevent the decontrol of houses which had been purchased on or after 7th November, 1956, being the date when this Bill was published. I deeply respect the intentions of those of my hon. Friends who moved and supported that Amendment. Their sole purpose, I know,

was to punish speculators in house property who were seeking to make a quick and indefensible profit out of the provisions of the Bill.
When that Amendment had been carried I had to consider most carefully what was the right advice which I should give to the House on Report, because I expressed myself in no uncertain terms in Committee about speculators. I said that I was willing to do anything I effectively could, whether by administrative action or by legislative proposals to the House, to make sure, as far as it in me lay, that speculators did not have a chance of easy money under the Bill.
I had to examine carefully what the effects and consequences of the Amendment then inserted into the Bill would be, and I am bound to say that I came to the conclusion that it would hit perfectly honest and honourable and normal transactions much harder than it would hit speculative deals. I have made inquiries, and contrary to what appears to be the common opinion in some quarters, there has not been any uprush of transactions in house property consequent on the Bill. In the stock market, if speculation develops in this market or in that, one can see that there is an unusual flurry of transactions; people are getting in and out quickly. There has been no evidence of anything of that kind in the property market since the Bill was published, nor was there such evidence in the weeks or months before that.
I grant the House at once that this does not prove that nobody has sought to speculate in the property market. The speculator will always be present and, in normal times, may perform a useful function in steadying the market and ironing out sudden oscillations this way or that. Certainly I do not propose to stand up here and say to the House that there are no speculators in property. What I say is that all the evidence available goes to show that there has been no outburst whatever of speculation, either in expectation of the Bill or after its terms were published.
We have to examine how the Bill would work if it were left at it stands. The words inserted against my advice in Standing Committee would have a limited operation; they would apply only to houses purchased after 7th November, 1956, and before the commencement of the Act. The House will appreciate that if a purchase took place after the commencement of the Act, then if the house fell within the rateable values for decontrol it would become decontrolled irrevocably and could not, as it were, be pulled into control again by this Amendment.
That small chronological section of houses purchased during that limited period would have remained in control if the Bill went through as it stands, and I have been asked whether it would be possible at a later date to decontrol them by use of my powers under sub

section (3), under which it is possible to decontrol further categories of houses in one area of the country or another. I went into that and I was advised that it would not be possible to use my powers in order to decontrol the particular class of house which was retained in control because of the Amendment passed in Committee.
The conclusion which I reached, therefore, taking one thing with another, was that though this Amendment might hit the odd speculator, it was likely to do injustice to a far greater number of people who, in the perfectly normal course of business, had conducted property transactions on and after 7th November, 1956.
Certainly one is anxious to avoid injustice to the honest individual; that is. indeed, one of the purposes of Parliament. Moreover, I was very doubtful whether it would catch the speculators, because it struck me that the man who was determined to make a profit would examine how he could avoid the mischief of the Amendment and would take steps to see that his actual purchase, in the legal sense, did not take effect until after the commencement of the Act. He would then escape the effect of the Amendment. He would have been, as it were, too clever for it. On all these grounds, I reached the conclusion that this was not an effective way to punish speculators, a thing which I should dearly like to do if there were practical means of doing it.
I know that publicity has been given to the kind of speculation that might take place. An hon. Friend of mine in Committee referred to a case—I think in the Borough of Harrow—where it was said that a block of flats had been purchased by speculators who intended to evict the tenants and let the flats furnished to American Service men who were stationed in the area. I have endeavoured to follow up everything that was said in the Standing Committee, and the moment that was said I had inquiries made; and what I found was that the block of flats had changed hands before the publication of the Bill, so that in any case it would not have been caught by the Amendment, and out of the 320 flats concerned only six were above' the rateable value limit for control. If, therefore, the buyers had bought them in the expectation that they would be able to get


vacant possession of all the 320, they would have been grievously disappointed in about 314 of them; so that case certainly did not assume the proportions of scandal which at first it appeared it might.
I have examined a number of alternative possibilities to see whether I could find some device or some formula which would catch the speculator without also catching the bona fide purchaser. Having in mind what my hon. Friend the Member for the Isle of Thanet (Mr. Rees-Davies) and my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich (Mr. Robert Jenkins) said earlier about the importance of acquainting myself with professional opinion, I have taken steps to try to obtain the best advice on the effect of the Amendment and as to alternative suggestions which might be made for achieving the object we all have at heart in some other way which would do less harm.
I have, as I say, considered a number of alternatives, but frankly none of them passed muster. They did not appear to me to be at all likely to penalise the man who was just out for a quick profit, whereas they would certainly have damaged and damnified ordinary people who in the course of perfectly normal business, winding up estates and the like, would have entered into property transactions after 7th February, 1956. I say here and now that I am grateful to my hon. Friends for having raised this in Committee. [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."] Yes, because I think that a good purpose has been served through the Committee for the time being disregarding my advice. I am being perfectly frank with the House. This will have given a sharp shock to the few people who thought that it was easy to disregard our intentions in a matter like this.
I am sure that if anyone had been acting in that way he would have spent an uncomfortable afternoon when reading in the evening paper that the Amendment had been carried. I am quite certain that during the period of weeks since the Amendment was passed and before I put down this Amendment there must have been a great deal of heart searching and, undoubtedly, some withdrawing from transactions which might otherwise have been entered into. In that sense, I consider that my hon. Friends have served

their purpose and a valuable purpose. If their Amendment were to remain in the Bill and reach the Statute Book, I can only advise the House that the injustice it would cause to a large number of perfectly innocent and honourable people would heavily outweight any good that it would do by hitting the speculator. It is for these reasons that I invite the House to accept my Amendment.

8.45 p.m.

Mr. Mitchison: The right hon. Gentleman is acquiring the manners of a school master intent on punishment. He ended his speech by thanking his hon. Friends for inserting an Amendment. He began by rebuking them for disregarding his advice. I am not quite certain whether we take Philip complacent or Philip irritated as the better of the two personages.

Mr. Brooke: Philip sober.

Mr. Mitchison: Philip sober. I hope so, but there are moments when, having regard to the contents of the Bill, I wonder whether we should take Philip sober, but the right hon. Gentleman himself invited the comparison which I should not have dared to make.
This has been a more successful mutiny than the Margate one. Apparently a mutiny is better understood in Oldham than in Margate, and in this case an Amendment was carried against the advice of the right hon. Gentleman, no doubt a most irritating state of affairs. I would remind him that the Amendment was considered in Committee at the same time as an Amendment which would have taken the date a great deal further back. What strikes me in the whole of this discussion is that the right hon. Gentleman finds it very hard to draw the line between speculation and legitimate transactions. So do I. I am not at all sure that there is such a line.
It is extremely difficult to draw a line in the case of landed property and the question is what ought to be done about those who had speculated—if I may use the right hon. Gentleman's words—in landed property, and not only since the date which now appears in the Bill. I never quite knew why that date was introduced. Could we not go back to the Llandudno period when the right hon. Gentleman's predecessor was talking


about complete decontrol? Could we not go back earlier yet to when the Tory Party was talking about reviewing the Rent Acts? Could we not go back to the period when one section of the Tory Party was saying that on no account whatever would rents be increased if the Tories came back to power and another section was saying that, all the same, the Rent Acts must be reviewed?
It would be a very interesting study, but is there any very large distinction between the gentlemen who will be caught by this Amendment and those who have been indulging in speculation earlier? Is it not the fact that transactions in landed property, whether we call them speculative or not, are going to yield, as a result of the Bill, an uncovenanted benefit to those who made them at the expense of the tenant? That seems to me to be the position. I hope we shall not take too long about the matter, because, at present, it is a dispute between, on the one side, the right hon. Gentleman and his loyal supporters, and on the other his loyal opponents on this side of the House and another crowd of doubtful, rather hesitant mutineers who, I am perfectly certain, will neither support nor vote for the Amendment which they moved and voted for during the Committee stage. We have seen quite enough of Tory dissidents to know that and to know that they will produce excellent reasons why they should not do so.
I hope that we shall not take too long about the matter, but I can assure the right hon. Gentleman that hon. Members on this side of the House have no intention of letting pass unopposed any Amendment which limits the effects of a subsection which we regard generally as quite wrong. Therefore, we shall vote against what he now proposes to do.

Sir I. Horobin: As the hon. Member who succeeded both in defeating and pleasing the Minister on this matter during the Committee stage discussions, I feel, despite the avuncular advice of the hon. and learned Member for Kettering (Mr. Mitchison), that I must ask the House to spend a little time on it. In spite of what my right hon. Friend said, I still think that this is a bad and an unnecessary Amendment which he is

moving. I regret it and I still think, in spite of what he has said—and bowing to his great experience and his special facilities for expert advice—that most people in the country feel, whatever their views on the general principles of this Bill, that there is a danger of undesirable speculation having occurred in the early days after this Bill was introduced.
Whether this is the right way of dealing with it or not, I feel that hon. Members on both sides of the House consider that something ought to be done about it. I say at once, as I said during the Committee stage discussions, that I agree with the Minister that a great deal of nonsense is talked about this and many other subjects by hon. Members opposite, They talk a lot about speculation, but they have not succeeded in putting anything on the Order Paper with regard to it. So far, the Amendment which I carried against the Government is the only one put down——

Mr. Mitchison: I hope that the hon. Gentleman will not make that sort of statement. We moved to leave out the whole of the subsection in which this occurs.

Sir I. Horobin: I know, but that has nothing to do with speculation. Perhaps the hon. and learned Gentleman was not listening to himself while he was talking.
On the other hand, in this matter, whatever their views about speculation in general, I think most people will feel that in the very tricky and difficult operation of getting rid of something like forty years of an artificial market, the presence of people seeking a quick profit will complicate the issue, and that, if it is at all possible, they should be specially dealt with.
From what they have said to me, I think that some hon. Members, who were not present during the Committee stage discussions, are not clear about what the Amendment which was carried upstairs would do and what it would not do, and 1 wish to make that clear. In the first place, and for reasons which seem to me obvious and sensible, it is not retrospective legislation. We are not altering the law retrospectively to the damage of anybody. No owner of property would be any worse off as a result of the Amendment than he would have been before the Bill was introduced. He would


only be not quite as much better off as he will be if the Minister's Amendment to put the Bill back into its original form is carried. Nor will the Amendment carried in Committee affect any of the other ways in which property can be decontrolled. It does not affect Clause 10 (2) at all. All it does is to take away the automatic decontrol arising out of the gross rateable value of the house.
I am very glad that the Minister has made the point himself, but lest he should give the impression that this was an oversight on my part when I drafted the Amendment I repeat that, in addition, it does not bring back into control any house automatically decontrolled when the Bill becomes law. There is no question of its imposing a permanent standstill in respect of a certain type of house. If, when the Bill becomes law, a house is in the same ownership as it was when the Bill was introduced, it will automatically become decontrolled, and the Amendment carried in Committee will not act to bring it back into control.
The Amendment affects a small, but important, section of the property market. It deals with those houses which changed hands between the time when the proposals of the Government became known, on 7th November last, and the time when the Bill becomes law. It deals, in reality, with an even smaller set of houses. As the Minister has admitted, after the Amendment was passed on 20th February the whole of the speculative market, such as it was, collapsed. I am glad to think that I played some part in bringing that about. Anybody buying after that date bought in the knowledge that there was a risk of his being left with controlled and not decontrolled property.
When we are talking about the Bill as it left Committee we must be absolutely clear what the Minister is trying to do in the Amendment. I still believe that in respect of houses whose ownership changed between the date of the introduction of the Bill, which made it known that legislation was being introduced to decontrol certain properties—which was on 7th November last—and the date upon which the Amendment was carried in Committee, certain special characteristics make it wise for Parliament to insert a certain special protection.
I am glad that I asked the Minister to refer to a point which I put to him,

which carries the matter a little further, namely, that even those houses which were bought with the immediate knowledge of the decontrol provisions do not require to be permanently left as special exceptions. The Minister has said that Clause 10 (3), which gives him power to make orders, does not in its present form enable him to make a later order decontrolling such properties when the market has settled down. I was surprised to hear that, but, even if his expert advisers are right, it could not be in the least difficult for another place so to amend that very wide order-making power as to make it possible for the Minister, if he so desired, to decontrol these houses at a later date.
9.0 p.m.
Surely that is the sensible way of proceeding. The whole of this Bill is based upon the theory—I think the right theory —that a fair market will develop in these higher gross rateable value houses. I know that hon. Members opposite do not accept that, but at least that is the basis upon which the Bill is presented and we do accept it. Surely it does not follow from that that we have to spoil a good case by overstating it and pledge ourselves to the view that that perfectly safe, well-known, straightforward market will settle down in the immediate future. I should have thought it doubtful that it would in some parts of the country.
Even expert advisers will not be able to advise clients what is the right and proper figure for leases and new agreements. Surely, the sensible thing to do—if I may use the colloquialism—is to keep these people "on ice" until the market has settled. Then everyone can make up their minds as to what is a reasonable agreement and an Order can be made to deal with it. If it is not possible under Clause 10 (3) as it stands, it should not be beyond the wits of Parliamentary draftsmen to make it so. I confess I cannot understand how that cannot be done even as it stands. If hon. Members will look at page 9 they will see that the Minister can make Orders and subsection (3) says:
… an order under this subsection may be made so as to relate to the whole of England and Wales, to the whole of Scotland, or to such area or areas in England and Wales or in Scotland as may be specified in the order, and so as to apply generally or only to, or except to, such classes or descriptions of dwelling-houses as may be so specified.


I frankly cannot understand on that basis why an Order cannot be made covering the whole of England, Wales and Scotland and applied to those houses, and only to those houses, which would have been decontrolled but for the words in the Amendment we passed in Committee upstairs. If that would not be an Order applying
… generally or only to, or except to, such classes or descriptions of dwelling-houses as may be so specified,
I cannot understand the words of the English language.

Mr. Herbert Butler: Could the hon. Member explain to the House why he considers it undesirable to speculate in land at a certain date, but obviously desirable to speculate before that date?

Sir I. Horobin: I was coming to that. The distinction I am making is simply that in the immediate period after these proposals became known some of us believe—certainly a great many persons outside believe—that a substantial number of undesirable people who, as always when it is likely that the price will go up, jumped on to it. It is the natural thing to do——

Mr. G. Lindgren: It is Tory philosophy.

Sir I. Horobin: It is not only Tory philosophy. I have no doubt that if we looked at the shares of hon. Members opposite we would find that they did not always buy something before it went down. Let the hon. Member ask some of the millionaires in the metal market who sit beside him. Do they always buy copper or lead when it is going down? They would not have made the vast sums they have made if that were so. Come off it. It may be Tory philosophy, but it is the practice of a great many millionaires on the Opposition Front Bench.

Mr. Mitchison: Mr. Mitchison rose—

Sir I. Horobin: There is a Guillotine on this discussion. The next point I want to put to the House arises directly out of the point I have been making that the clear, known, straightforward, balanced market cannot be expected to arise in a few months when this Bill becomes law.
There are two dangers we have to guard against. First, there is the danger

of what I may call the eviction in error. My right hon. Friend and many people defending the Bill have frequently said that the real protection is that if owners ask too much they will burn their fingers and have their houses empty.
There is a great deal in that, but what consolation is it to somebody who has been turned out of a house? Once the market has declared itself we may reasonably hope, and I am sure it will in fact happen, that people will know what is a rent which can be asked and what is a rent which they must expect to pay for similar accommodation, and an arrangement will be reached. But if these unsavoury gentry in fact give a number of evictions, then, even if they eventually burn their fingers, a great many people will have been turned out of their houses who ought not to have been turned out of them. For that reason alone I think the Amendment which we passed in Standing Committee is good.
There is a second, and to my mind very much greater, danger which we have to guard against. In many cases, we must guard the tenants against themselves. As a result of much of this propaganda which has gone on, with some basis but a great deal of it very exaggerated, there is a danger if we are not careful that many tenants will sign agreements for three years and other periods for rents which later the landlords would have been unable to get. and they will be very sorry that they have signed them. It is partly a result of Socialist and Thanet propaganda that there is a danger of tenants entering into agreements which later they will regret..
During these discussions, which have been going on for weeks, I have suggested that it might well be worth the Minister's while to consider putting a compulsory break clause in the Fourth Schedule for any of these leases which are signed. I know there are objections to that, but I strongly suggest to the House that in the case of some of the persons who bought property immediately after the introduction of the Bill there is a danger either that they will evict or that they will lead tenants, through fear, into signing agreements which they ought not to sign. The Amendment which we carried in Standing Committee would protect tenants against that, and for that reason I believe it should be allowed to stand..
I must deal with two other points which the Minister has used in his argument. He started by talking about innocent transactions. Of course, a great many of these transactions are perfectly innocent in that sense, but I cannot assent to his proposition, nor can I see why hon. Members on either side of the House should assent to it, that owners of property are entitled to feel that they have a grievance if a Bill is amended in the course of being passed through Parliament. The Minister is saying that it is wrong for the hon. Member for Oldham, East in Standing Committee to change a Bill on 20th February, because people may have entered into transactions on 7th November thinking that they would get control of houses. He says it is wrong that on 20th February, while the Bill is going through the House, that provision should be altered. How can that argument be used? Two days earlier, on 18th February, the Minister himself introduced an Amendment telling unfortunate, innocent people who had bought expecting to get decontrol in six months that, in fact, they would have to wait for fifteen months. Why is it wrong and improper forty-eight hours later?.
The other argument which is put to us is that here we are getting the complication of a peculiar little set of houses contrary to the general rule, and it makes it an untidy Bill. That is the kind of thing Departments always say. It is perfectly true that it is an arbitrary date to some extent. The hon. and learned Member for Kettering (Mr. Mitchison) said he did not understand. I would not stress that but at any rate it is an arbitrary date. But whatever the hon. and learned Member may say on that. the Minister cannot..
I would invite the House to look at the Sixth Schedule in page 31, of the Bill as introduced by the Minister. This was not an afterthought or a revolt, or a "Jolly Roger" business. This is how it was originally introduced. The Minister put in a provision—I think a very good one—that we should improve the opportunities for owners who wanted to get their own house for their own occupation to get it without proof, in that case, of alternative accommodation..
I do not want to upset the Minister at this late hour, but I must just read three lines from his own Bill—paragraph 21:

(h)the dwelling-house is reasonable required by the landlord (not being a landlord who has become landlord by purchasing the dwelling-house or any interest therein after the seventh day of November, nineteen hundred and fifty-six) …
If it is very wrong to draw a distinction between people who buy after and people who buy before, he is in the dog house with me.
A third point is surely this. Nobody can go into metaphysics as to whether a purchaser is innocent or guilty. We have to draw a broad distinction. On the one hand, there are some persons, who, without any idea of speculation at all, have become possessed of their property in those three months, and will not, if our Amendment stands, be quite as much better off as they would have been. To that extent they are less better off than are others. On the other hand, we have to balance the possibility that tenants of landlords of the undesirable type whom all of us, including the Minister, do not like, may find themselves either on the street or subject to a long lease which they have signed, under misapprehension, at too high a price. How can anyone seriously balance the two damages that will be done, on the one side and on the other?
I have taken some time, but I believe that this matter of speculation is important. Of course, if the Government, by hook or by "Brooke"—[HON. MEMBERS: "By crook."]—are deterinmed to get this, nobody, at this late stage, can stop them. I know that we shall be jeered at by the hon. and learned Gentleman. We have carried this against the Government upstairs, but there is no point at all on our part to try to force it by voting against the Government. [Interruption.]Well, what will happen? People who have not listened to the debate will come in and it will be "Clear the Lobbies—bring in the dancing girls," and the Minister——

Mr. Mitchison: Is it in order, Mr. Deputy-Speaker. to refer to hon. Ladies in this House as dancing girls?

Mr. Deputy-Speaker (Sir Gordon Touche): I think that the hon. Member's imagination went too far.

Sir I. Horobin: I am sorry. I was led away, thinking for a moment that I was Mr. Dulles explaining the American way of life to Ibn Saud.
I can only hope that, on the balance of argument, in another place the Government will realise that on this matter they will be very well advised to try to do something. if the Minister does not like our way of doing it, then, I say, it is up to him to find a better way. I am very sorry that he has moved this Amendment, and I hope very much that he will think better of it.

Sir Harold Webbe: I am afraid that I cannot hope to emulate the boisterous and breezy manner of my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham, East (Sir I. Horobin). Indeed, having listened to him, I think that there is every reason why the Chancellor should reconsider the whole question of entertainment tax and put some sort of tax on our debates here.
I want, if I may, very briefly to make a suggestion. I do not want to traverse or in any detail go into the arguments in favour or against this particular Amendment. I should like for a moment to remind my right hon. Friend of what happened when this Amendment was moved in Committee upstairs. I was not a Member of the Committee, but I have with me the OFFICIAL REPORT of what took place.
9.15 p.m.
When the Amendment was introduced, the Minister welcomed it as one with which he had the greatest sympathy, and he expressed himself as entirely in sympathy with its object. He then proceeded to say a great many things about speculators and he showed a fluency of invective of which I, in the years I have known him, had never before suspected him to be capable. He made the point, which he has made again tonight, that the number of speculators is probably much less than many people think, but he did say:
 I agree with my hon. Friend that the number is very small. but, even so, a few evilly-disposed people can do great damage".
He went on to express his own concern that something should be done to curb the activities of speculators, however many or few there may be, and said:
I certainly assure the Committee that I intend to go into this matter very carefully and to leave nothing undone to secure the objectives which my hon. Friend has in mind and which I believe have the support of the Committee.

A little later he said:
 I am giving this assurance in the strongest possible terms".
and he said that from his experience at the Treasury he had learned that
 it was desirable not to explain in too great detail in public what devices are available to those who are seeking to prevent these light-fingered gentlemen from getting round the law Or around public opinion."—[OFFCIAL REPORT, Standing Committee A, 20th February, 1957; c. 880-1]
I have looked at the Notice Paper. Apparently, my right hon. Friend feels that his lips are still sealed and he has not yet given any indication of when he will be prepared to open them.
A little earlier today we had a short debate on a proposed new Clause intended to limit the rents which landlords might demand of their tenants for a short interim period of three years. Quite frankly, I did not like that Clause as it stood, because, as the Minister pointed out, it went far too wide and might be properly effective, perhaps, in such areas as Central London but would have a bad effect in the rest of the country. I therefore voted against that new Clause. The problem of the speculator still remains, and one method of exploitation open to him is the demanding of excessive rents. Coming to consider the Amendment now before us, I believe that the Minister is right to ask that the words which were inserted by the Committee should be withdrawn, because, with him, I consider that the words as they now stand go far too wide and affect too many people.
The suggestion I should like to put to him in this. Is there not here a possibility for a compromise solution? Would my right hon. Friend consider whether he could, in another place, introduce some provision which would impose a reasonable limitation on rents which a landlord could demand, but apply it simply to the limited class of property to which the Amendment now under discussion relates? We must assume that that class comprises many, if not most, of the speculators whom we all desire to stop.
If we could have some kind of limit on those speculators, if the figure were reasonably fixed, no serious damage would be done to honest investors in property who fell within the category of short-term owners. No serious damage


would be done to them because the limit would not be one which they, if they were serious owners, would want to exceed, but it would certainly be another method of holding up the speculator in preventing him from using the weapon of demanding excessive rents.
If before the time that the Bill goes to another place my right hon. Friend could consider whether a compromise of that kind could he reached by the insertion of a temporary rent ceiling in respect of this limited group of properties, I believe that it would he appreciated by the public. I believe that it would have some effect, and I do not believe that the objectionable consequences to which my right hon. Friend has referred would follow.

Mr. Sparks: I want to add a brief word in support of the retention of these words in the Clause. There is validity in some of the arguments which have been advanced from the benches opposite, and it is a development of which the Minister should be aware. In the first place, we all know that in point of law a tenant of a house is not entitled to sublet any part of that house unless he has obtained the consent of the landlord to the subletting. Over the course of time, a good deal of subletting of this kind has taken place, especially in our great cities and towns, in which the tenant has sublet accommodation in the house without the knowledge and the consent of the landlord. We know that these subtenants have no security whatever under the Bill, but there are undoubtedly cases when. at sonic time, the tenant probably had the verbal consent of the landlord to subletting part of the house.
I am rather amazed at the new development which is taking place. An old lady came to see me in my constituency a few days ago. She is the tenant of a house. In the course of years her family grew up and went away and she sublet part of the house to two other tenants. The house had been sold to a new landlord since 7th November, 1956. Quite recently, the new landlord came to the house and introduced himself. He asked the tenant to let him see the house. She proceeded to let him see it, and obviously had to reveal that there were two subtenants. He said. "But they have no right to be here." The woman said to him, "But they have been here for some

years." He replied, "Show me the landlord's consent to the subletting." Obviously, she could not show him any consent, although by custom over a period of time the sub-tenancy arrangement had continued.
As it happens, the house itself will come out of control under the Bill because it is about £40 rateable value. But if the rateable value were apportioned among the three tenants in the place it would be retained in control. The new landlord has told the tenant that he intends to obtain possession of the house and to sell it. He has told the tenant that he has no right to sublet any part of the house, and the tenant was unable to produce proof that the landlord had at any time given consent to subletting.
The object of this new form of development is quite clear. In my constituency, where there is a serious shortage of housing accommodation, the object is to acquire a house of that kind at a reasonably low figure and then to dispossess the tenant, because the house goes out of control, and to dispossess the sub-tenants because the mesne tenant is unable to produce proof that the landlord has consented to subletting, and then to take possession of the house. put three families out on the street and sell the house at a higher price than could be obtained for it a few months ago.
I have an idea that if the words proposed to be left out remain in the Bill some protection will be given to those people who live in the house, because the house has been purchased since 7th November, 1956. and this individual would be one of those who would not be able to benefit by what is obviously a sheer speculation. I am quite satisfied that this sort of thing is going on. It may well gather momentum unless there is some form of protection to tenants and subtenants in similar conditions.
I hope that the Minister will look into this aspect of the matter. In Committee pressed him to inquire into this very factor, but he has not indicated whether he has done that or what proposal he will submit to the House to protect innocent people who find themselves in a situation in which they are likely to be put out on the street, either because of the custom of subletting in the way I have mentioned, or because the superior or mesne tenant has not proved that the


landlord has actually given him consent to sublet. I hope, therefore, that the House will agree to allow these words to remain in the Clause, because although they are not a very great protection, they are some measure of protection against the growth of speculation of the kind that I have described.

Mr. Rees-Davies: I hope that the hon. Member for Acton (Mr. Sparks) will forgive me if I do not follow him in his remarks. I was unable to follow the niceties and complexities of his argument. I want to take up the matter of the Amendment which deals only with the question of houses purchased after 7th November, 1956. The Amendment, unfortunately, is wholly indiscriminate. It covers the good with the bad. It covers the trustee who is buying on behalf of the widow in the same way as it covers the others, but it is quite useful until we have some proper provision against speculation. Every hon. Member has spoken against speculation, but there is no provision in the Bill against it which will have any effect at all, other than that which refers to premiums, and that will have no effect until it be amended later.
9.30 p.m.
Before we discuss speculators, we should define what they are. Neither the hon. and learned Member for Kettering (Mr. Mitchison) nor the Minister has had a crack at that task. My hon. Friend the Member for Oldham, East (Sir I. Horobin), in his engaging if somewhat schizophrenic speech—schizophrenic only because he complained against speculation, but puts down an Amendment which will hit speculators and others equally. and then attacks me for having put down an Amendment which would, in fact, protect one against any speculation, and against excessive rents and which would have the desired effect we all have in mind. However that may be, I think it is important to define what is a speculator. May I suggest that a definition of a speculator is as follows? A speculator is a person who engages in transactions—more than one—for the purpose of gaining unjust enrichment at the expense of tenants. [Laughter.] I am not quite sure whether, so to speak, hon. Gentlemen opposite are laughing with me or against me, but I hope it is not at me, but with me.
The principles of the doctrine of unjust enrichment are part of the common law of England, and it is perfectly clear what are the principles of unjust enrichment. It is for the Government to determine when they become unjust, in the light of the circumstances of the case. In fact, if we prescribe such a level of rents as takes no account of the factor of scarcity, so that people can exploit the emotions of other people, we are doing something in the way of providing opportunities for unjust enrichment, and that is speculating in rents.
Let us examine some cases of speculation for sale. In the case of a speculator, a person who sells at the proper date with possession and in the open market cannot be a speculator on the sale of property, because there is the free play of the market. But if one goes to a woman who has lived for twenty-five years in a particular property, whose children are at the local school and whose friends have been built up in that neighbourhood, and says to that person, "I am going to ask you £2,500 for this property whereas I would only ask £2,200 in the open market; I know you will pay the extra £ 300, because you do not want to move," one is, in fact, inviting unjust enrichment and engaging in speculation.

Mr. Janner: Is not that precisely what this Bill is doing? It is exactly what the Bill does.

Mr. Rees-Davies: The hon. Member for Leicester, North-West (Mr. Janner) obviously did not hear the observations which I made earlier this afternoon, and the suggestion which I put forward to prevent this type of speculation, either by way of limitation of excessive rent or premiums or by giving an option to the sitting tenant to purchase.
What I am saying is that if the hon. Gentleman is sincere, and I presume that he is sincere in his desire to stop speculation, and if we are, in fact, to stop speculation, we must stop it both in selling and in letting, in premiums and in excessive rents, and also deal with it in the question of sale by providing that the tenant has a chance to buy. If we do that in these three fields, we shall prevent speculation; otherwise, we shall not do so.
May I now give examples in relation to this Amendment? Although I am attracted to the idea behind it, I think that, in fact, it is completely impracticable. Let me take two examples. Malvern Court, Chelsea, was bought by the Glass Bros. last October or November, and they asked a £7,000 premium, with the offer of a lease to be taken up for sixty years. They are also asking for high rentals, well over double what they were previously.
This Amendment will not cover them because the cleverest of the speculators bought twelve to fifteen months ago in London. They have not been buying since the Bill was published. They have been waiting to see its effects. I assure the House that they have not been buying very much since some of us made speeches in the Second Reading debate, because they recognised that there was a great deal of feeling against them on both sides of the House. They have been waiting. Therefore the speculator was either the person who bought earlier or he will be the man who will start after the Act comes into effect.
Now I will take the case, a shocking one, of Park West, Edgware Road, a block of flats near the Marble Arch. I have the facts from an estate agent concerned in the matter. There are 650 tenants at Park West and all of them will receive notice to quit. The intention is to convert the flats into service suites, all furnished. The present rentals are £200 to £300 a year unfurnished, and for a two-room service suite furnished a price of £37 a week is to be asked. It is no good people saying that this Amendment will cover that type of person. I suggest that something has to be thought of before the Bill becomes law to stop that type of unjust enrichment.
I am not contending that any of the Amendments which I or my hon. Friends have put down are perfect. It would be intolerable for anyone to suggest that any specific Amendment is perfect in housing matters of this kind. They all represent the lesser of two evils, but, one way or another, it seems to me that such a type of person must be stopped. I say frankly that this Amendment may have played some part in stopping what has been going on. That is entirely in accord with what the Minister has said

on this matter, namely, that there has not been a lot of speculation since the Bill was published up to the present time. However, at some stage, and somehow, these people must be stopped. They will not have a very long run once the market settles down. We hope that tenants will listen to professional advice and will not be stampeded by landlords. The fact that this Bill is going through, and the views which have been expressed, may well stop tenants from being stampeded. Nevertheless it would appear that somehow there ought to be some quid pro quo for the removal of the Amendment.
The Minister said it must have been a sharp and salutary shock for the speculators when the Amendment was carried, and that they must have had an unfortunate afternoon. I think they must have done, but the cleverer ones knew quite well that it would be reversed here. They said so. They knew it would be reversed for a very good reason. They knew that the Minister has a good knowledge of housing and knew that the Amendment was unsatisfactory. To be frank, so did all the hon. Gentlemen on those 'benches opposite know it was unsatisfactory. They knew very well that it was not the way to do it. Therefore, we have to find another way.
I can see that in the light of what has been said this afternoon we must find a way. I hope that in another place, where there are men with considerable knowledge of the property world—[HON. MEMBERS: "Hear, hear."] It is all very well for hon. Gentlemen opposite to laugh—[HON. MEMBERS: "We are agreeing."]—I know, but, after all, some landlords and their professional advisers are not averse to safeguards and Amendments. For a very good reason, too. We often talk here about the bad landlord. He represents less than 10 per cent. of all the landlords, and about 90 per cent. of the property of this country is in the hands of the great companies, such as the Prudential and others, whose standards are of the highest. [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."] Yes, and these good landlords recognise that it is the bad landlord who is giving a thoroughly bad name to the profession. If it means losing a little money from their point of view for a short term to create conditions of stability, it is my judgment that these landlords are prepared to forgo


that money for the sake of stability in the long run, for they are in the market for their lives, for the future and for the stability of their companies.
In conclusion, I would make this plea. I hope that before the Bill takes effect some further safeguards will be provided by way of graduated rents, or a control on the ceiling of rents, and also a control on the option to purchase. Then I believe we shall be able effectively to prevent the type of unjust enrichment which, I believe, defines what is meant by a "speculator."

Mr. Blenkinsop: We cannot let the Amendment go without asking the Minister to reply to the very strong speeches which have been made from both sides of the House. We are suffering under the Guillotine, which prevents free discussion of the matter, but on this subject we have had expressions of concern from all who have spoken. There is doubt about the value of the Amendment carried in Committee and general agreement that there must be revision of the Measure before it becomes an Act.
If there were an honest free vote and hon. Members opposite could express their views, or had the courage to do so, there is no doubt that the Bill would have

to be altered, whether the Minister liked it or not. Will he, therefore, at least let us know what Amendments he proposes to meet the case put by all his hon. Friends who have spoken?

Mr. H. Brooke: Naturally, I shall give attention to everything that is said in the House, as I did to everything that was said in Committee. The fruits of that attention are seen in a large number of Amendments in my name on the Order Paper.
However, at the moment we are addressing ourselves to an Amendment I have moved to delete some words inserted against my advice in Committee, which, if they remained in the Bill, would do a grave injustice to a considerable number of innocent people. It is contrary to my principles and philosophy to advise Parliament to do harm to innocent people, and it is because I believe that the Bill will do great good without these words that I must urge the House to accept the Amendment.

Question put That the words proposed to be left out stand part of the Bill:—

The House divided: Ayes 237, Noes 268

Division No. 85.]
AYES
[9.42 p.m.


Ainsley, J. W
Corbet, Mrs. Freda
Grimond, J


Albu, A. H
Cove, W. G
Hall, Rt. Hn. Glenvil (Colne Valley)


Allaun, Frank (Salford, E.)
Craddock, George (Bradford, S.)
Hamilton, W. W


Allen, Arthur (Bosworth)
Cronin, J. D.
Hannan, W


Allen, Scholefield (Crewe)
Crossman, R. H. S.
Harrison, J. (Nottingham, N.)


Awbery, S. S.
Cullen, Mrs. A.
Hastings, S


Bacon, Miss Alice
Dalton, Rt. Hon. H,
Hayman, F. H.


Baird, J.
Davies, Ernest (Enfield, E.)
Healey, Denis


Bellenger, Rt. Hon. F. J
Davies, Harold (Leek)
Henderson, Rt. Hn. A. (Rwly Regis)


Bence, C. R. (Dunbartonshire, E.)
Davies, Stephen (Merthyr)
Herbison, Miss M


Benn, Hn. Wedgwood (Bristol, S.E.)
Deer, G
Hobson, C. R. (Keighley)


Benson, G.
de Freitas, Geoffrey
Holman, P.


Beswick, Frank
Delargy, H. J.
Holmes, Horace


Blackburn, F,
Dodds, N. N
Holt, A. F.


Blenkinsop, A.
Donnelly, D. L
Howell, Charles (Perry Barr)


Blyton, W. R
Dugdale, Rt. Hn. John (W. Brmwch)
Howell, Denis (All Saints)


Boardman, H.
Dye, S.
Hoy, J. H.


Bowden, H. W. (Leicester, S.W.)
Ede, Rt. Hon. J. C.
Hubbard, T. F


Bowen, E. R. (Cardigan)
Edelman, M.
Hughes, Cledwyn (Anglesey)


Bowles, F. G
Edwards, Rt. Hon. John (Brighouse)
Hughes, Emrys (S. Ayrshire)


Boyd, T. C
Edwards, Rt. Hon. Ness (Caerphilly)
Hughes, Hector (Aberdeen, N.)


Braddock, Mrs. Elizabeth
Edwards, Robert (Bilston)
Hunter, A. E.


Brockway, A, F.
Edwards, W.J. (Stepney)
Hynd, H. (Accrington)


Brown, Thomas (Ince)
Evans, Albert (Islington, S.W.)
Irvine, A. J. (Edge Hill)


Burke, W. A.
Evans, Edward (Lowestoft)
Irving, Sydney (Dartford)


Burton, Miss F. E
Fernyhough, E
Isaacs, Rt. Hon. G. A.


Butler, Herbert (Hackney, C.)
Fienburgh, W
Janner, B.


Butler, Mrs. Joyce (Wood Green)
Finch, H. J.
Jay, Rt. Hon. D. P. T.


Callaghan, L. J.
Fletcher, Eric
Jeger, George (Goole)


Carmichael, J.
Forman, J. C
Jeger, Mrs. Lena (Holbn &amp; St. Pnes, S.)


Castle, Mrs. B. A.
George, Lady Megan Lloyd
Jenkins, Roy (Stechford)


Champion, A. J
Gibson, C. W.
Johnston, Douglas (Paisley)


Chapman, W. D
Gooch, E. G
Jones, David (The Hartlepools)


Chetwynd, G. R
Greenwood, Anthony
Jones, Jack (Rotherham)


Coldrick, W
Grenfell, Rt. Hon. D. R.
Jones, J. ldwal (Wrexham)


Collick, P. H. (Birkenhead)
Grey, C. F
Jones, T. W. (Merioneth)


Collins, V. J. (Shoreditch &amp; Finsbury)
Griffiths, Rt. Hon. James (Llanelly)
Key, Rt. Hon. C. W.




King, Dr. H. M.
Owen, W. J.
Stonehouse, J. T.


Lawson, G. M.
Padley, W. E.
Stones, W. (Consett)


Ledger, R. J.
Paget, R. T.
Strachey, Rt. Hon. J.


Lee, Frederick (Newton)
Paling. Rt. Hon. W. (Dearne Valley)
Summerskill, Rt. Hon. E.


Lee, Miss Jennie (Cannock)
Palmer, A. M. F.
Swingler, S. T.


Lever, Harold (Cheetham)
Pannell, Charles (Leeds, W.)
Sylvester, G. O.


Lever, Leslie (Ardwick)
Parker, J.
Taylor, Bernard (Mansfield)


Lewis, Arthur
Parkin, B. T.
Taylor, John (West Lothian)


Lindgren, G. S.
Paton, John
Thomas, George (Cardiff)


Lipton, Marcus
Peart, T. F.
Thomas, Iorwerth (Rhondda, W.)


MacColl, J. E.
Pentland, N.
Thomson, George (Dundee, E.)


McGhee, H. G.
Plummer, Sir Leslie
Thornton, E.


McGovern, J.
Popplewell, E.
Timmons, J.


Mctinnes, J.
Price, J. T. (Westhoughton)
Ungoed-Thomas, Sir Lynn


McKay, John (Wallsend)
Price, Philips (Gloucestershire, W.)
Viant, S. P.


MacDermot, Niall
Probert, A. R.
Wade, D. W.


MacMillan, M. K. (Western Isles)
Proctor, W. T.
Warbey, W. N.


MacPherson, Malcolm (Stirling)
Pryde, D. J.
Watkins, T. E.


Mahon, Simon
Randall, H. E.
Weitxman, D.


Mainwaring, W. H.
Rankin, John
Wells, Percy (Faversham)


Mallalieu, E. L. (Brigg)
Redhead, E. C.
Wells, William (Walsall, N.)


Mallalieu, J. P. W. (Huddersfd, E.)
Reeves, J.
West, D. G.


Mann, Mrs. Jean
Reld, William
Wheeldon, W. E.


Marquand, Rt. Hon. H. A.
Robens, Rt. Hon. A.
White, Mrs. Eirene (E. Flint)


Mason, Roy
Roberts, Albert (Normanton)
White, Henry (Derbyshire, N.E.)


Mayhew, C. P.
Roberts, Goronwy (Caernarvon)
Wigg, George


Mellish, R. J.
Robinson, Kenneth (St. Pancras, N.)
Wilcock, Group Capt. C. A. B.


Messer, Sir F.
Rogers, George (Kensington, N.)
Wilkins, W. A.


Mitchison, G. R.
Ross, William
Willey, Frederick


Monslow, W.
Royle, C.
Williams, David (Neath)


Moody, A. S.
Shinwell, Rt. Hon. E.
Williams, Rev. Llywelyn (Ab'tillery)


Morris, Percy (Swansea, W.)
Short, E. W.
Williams, Ronald (Wigan)


Morrison, Rt. Hn,Herbert(Lewis'm,S.)
Shurmer, P. L. E.
Williams, Rt. Hon. T. (Don Valley)


Mort, D. L.
Silverman, Julius (Aston)
Williams, W. R. (Openshaw)


Moss, R.
Skeffington, A.M.
Williams, W. T. (Barons Court)


Moyle, A.
Slater, Mrs. H. (Stoke, N.)
Willis, Eustace (Edinburgh, E.)


Mulley, F. W.
Slater, J. (Sedgefield)
Woof, R. E.


Neal, Harold (Bolsover)
Smith, Ellis (Stoke, S.)
Yates, V. (Ladywood)


Noel-Baker, Rt. Hon. P. (Derby, S.)
Sorensen, R. W.
Younger, Rt. Hon. K.


O'Brien, Sir Thomas
Soskice, Rt. Hon. Sir Frank
Zilliacus, K.


Oliver, G. H.
Sparks, J. A.



Orbach, M.
Steele, T.
TELLERS FOR THE AYES:


Oswald, T.
Stewart, Michael (Fulham)
Mr. Pearson and Mr. Simmons.




NOES


Agnew, Sir Peter
Browne, J Nixon (Craigton)
Fort, R.


Aitken, W. T.
Bullus, Wing Commander E. E.
Fraser, Sir Ian (M'cmbe &amp; Lonsdale)


Allan, R. A. (Paddington, S.)
Butcher, Sir Herbert
Freeth, Dezil


Alport, C. J. M.
Campbell, Sir David
Garner-Evans, E. H.


Amery, Julian (Preston, N.)
Carr, Robert
George, J. C. (Pollok)


Amory, Rt. Hn. Heathcoat (Tiverton)
Cary, Sir Robert
Gibson-Watt, D.


Anstruther-Gray, Major Sir William
Channon, Sir Henry
Godber, J. B.


Arbuthnot, John
Chichester-Clark, R.
Gomme-Duncan, Col. Sir Alan


Armstrong, C. W.
Clarke, Brig. Terence (Portsmth, W.)
Goodhart, P. C.


Ashton, H.
Conant, Maj. Sir Roger
Gower, H. R.


Astor, Hon. J, J.
Cooke, Robert
Graham, Sir Fergus


Atkins, H. E.
Cooper-Key, E. M.
Green, A.


Baldock, Lt.-Cmdr. J. M.
Cordeaux, Lt.-Col. J. K.
Gresham Cooke, R.


Baldwin, A. E.
Corfield, Capt. F. V.
Grimston, Hon. John (St. Albans)


Balniel, Lord
Craddock, Beresford (Spelthorne)
Grimston, sir Robert (Westbury)


Barter, John
Crouch, R. F.
Grosvenor, Lt.-Col- R. G.


Baxter, Sir Beverley
Crowder, Sir John (Finchley)
Gurden, Harold


Beamish, Maj. Tufton
Crowder, Petre (Ruislip—Northwood)
Hall, John (Wycombe)


Bell, Ronald (Bucks, S.)
Cunningham, Knox
Hare, Rt. Hon. J. H.


Bennett, F. M. (Torquay)
Currie, G. B. H.
Harris, Frederic (Croydon, N.W.)


Bennett, Dr. Reginald
Dance, J. C. G.
Harris, Reader (Heston)


Bevins, J. R. (Toxteth)
Davidson, viscountess
Harrison, A. B. C. (Maldon)


Bidgood, J. C.
Deedes, W. F.
Harrison, Col. J. H. (Eye)


Biggs-Davison, J. A.
Digby, Simon Wingfield
Harvey, Air Cdre. A. V. (Macclesld)


Birch, Rt. Hon. Nigel
Doughty, C. J. A.
Harvey, Ian (Harrow, E.)


Bishop, F. P.
du Cann, E. D. L.
Harvey, John (Walthamstow, E.)


Black, C. W.
Dugdale, Rt. Hn. Sir T. (Richmond)
Harvie-Watt, Sir George


Body, R. F.
Duncan, Capt. J. A. L.
Hay, John


Boothby, Sir Robert
Duthie, W. S.
Heald, Rt. Hon. Sir Lionel


Bossom, Sir Alfred
Eden, J. B. (Bournemouth, West)
Heath, Rt. Hon. E. R. G.


Boyd-Carpenter, Rt. Hon. J. A.
Elliott, R. W.
Henderson, John (Cathcart)


Boyle, Sir Edward
Emmet, Hon. Mrs. Evelyn
Hesketh, R. F.


Braine, B. R.
Farey-Jones, F. W.
Hicks-Beach, Maj. W. W.


Braithwaite, Sir Albert (Harrow, W.)
Fell, A.
Hill, Rt. Hon. Charles (Luton)


Bromley-Davenport, Lt.-Col. W. H.
Finlay, Graeme
Hill, Mrs. E. (Wythenshawe)


Brooke, Rt. Hon. Henry
Fisher, Nigel
Hill, John (S Norfolk)


Brooman-White, R. C.
Fletcher-Cooke, C.
Hinchingbrooke, Viscount







Hobson, J. G. S.(War'ck &amp; Leam'gtn)
MacLeod, John (Ross &amp; Cromarty)
Robert, Sir Peter (Hesley)


Holland-Martin, C. J.
Macmillan, Maurice (Halifax)
Robertson, Sir David


Hope, Lord John
Macpherson, Niall (Dumfries)
Robson-Brown, W.


Hornby, R. P.
Maddan, Martin
Roper, Sir Harold


Hornsby-Smith, Miss M. P.
Maitland, Cdr. J. F. W. (Horncastle)
Ropner, Col. Sir Leonard


Horsbrugh, Rt. Hon. Dame Florence
Maitland, Hon. Patrick (Lanark)
Russell, R. S.


Howard, Hon. Greville (St. Ives)
Manningham-Buller, Rt. Hn. Sir R.
Schofield, Lt.-Col. W.


Howard, John (Test)
Marlowe, A. A. H.
Scott-Miller, Cmdr. R.


Hughes Hallett, Vice-Admiral J.
Marshall, Douglas
Sharples, R. C.


Hughes-Young, M. H. C.
Mathew, R.
Shepherd, William


Hulbert, Sir Norman
Maude, Angus
Smithers, Peter (Winchester)


Hutchison, Sir Ian Clark (E'b'gh, W.)
Mawby, R. L.
Smyth, Brig. Sir John (Norwood)


Hutchison, Sir James (Scotstoun)
Maydon, Lt.-Comdr, S. L. C.
Spearman, Sir Alexander


Hyde, Montgomery
Medlicott, Sir Frank
Speir, R. M.


Hyiton-Foster, Rt. Hon. Sir Harry
Milligan, Rt. Hon. W. R.
Spence, H. R. (Aberdeen, W.)


Iremonger, T. L.
Molson, Rt. Hon. Hugh
Spens, Rt. Hn. Sir P. (Kens'gt'n, S.)


Irvine, Bryant Godman (Rye)
Moore, Sir Thomas
Stanley, Capt. Hon. Richard


Jenkins, Robert (Dulwich)
Morrison, John (Salisbury)
Stevens, Geoffrey


Jennings, J C. (Burton)
Mott-Radclyffe, Sir Charles
Steward, Harold (Stockport, S.)


Johnson, Dr. Donald (Carlisle)
Nabarro, G. D. N.
Stewart, Sir James Henderson (Fife, E.)


Johnson, Eric (Blackley)
Nairn, D. L. S.
Stoddart-Soott, Col. M.


Johnson, Howard (Kemptown)
Neave, Airey
Storey, S.


Joseph, Sir Keith
Nicholls, Harmar
Stuart, Rt. Hon. James (Moray)


Joynson-Hicks, Hon. Sir Lancelot
Nicholson, Godfrey (Farnham)
Studholme, Sir Henry


Kaberry, D.
Nicolson, N. (B'n'm'th, E. &amp; Chr'ch)
Summers, Sir Spencer


Keegan, D.
Noble, Comdr. A. H. P.
Taylor, Sir Charles (Eastbourne)


Kerby, Capt. H. B.
Nugent, G. R. H.
Temple, John M.


Kerr, H. W.
Oakshott, H. D.
Thomas, P. J. M. (Conway)


Kershaw, J. A.
O'Neill, Hn. Phelim (Co. Antrim, N.)
Thompson, Kenneth (Walton)


Kimball, M.
Ormsby-Gore, Rt. Hon. W. D.
Thompson, Lt.-Cdr. R. (Croydon, S.)


Kirk, P. M.
Orr, Capt. L. P. S.
Thornton-Kemsloy, C. N.


Lagden, G. W.
Orr-Ewing, Charles Ian (Hendon, N.)
Tiley, A. (Bradford, W.)


Lambert, Hon. G.
Orr-Ewing, Sir Ian (Weston-S-Mare)
Turner, H. F. L.


Lancaster, Col. C. G.
Osborne, C.
Turton, Rt. Hon. R. H.


Langford-Holt, J. A.
Pannell, N. A. (Kirkdale)
Tweedsmuir, Lady


Leavey, J. A.
Partridge, E.
Vane, W. M. F.


Legge-Bourke, Maj. E. A. H.
Peyton, J. W. W.
Vaughan-Morgan, J. K.


Legh, Hon. Peter (Petersfield)
Pike, Miss Mervyn
Vosper, Rt. Hon. D. F.


Lindsay, Hon. James (Devon, N.)
Pilkington, Capt. R. A.
Wakefield, Edward (Derbyshire, W.)


Linstead, Sir H. N.
Pitman, I. J.
Wakefield, Sir Wavell (St. M'lebone)


Llewellyn, D. T.
Pitt, Miss E. M.
Walker-Smith, Rt. Hon. D. C.


Lloyd, Maj. Sir Guy (Renfrew, E.)
Pott, H. P.
Ward, Rt. Hon. G. R. (Worcester)


Longden, Gilbert
Powell, J. Enoch
Waterhouse, Capt. Rt. Hon. C.


Low, Rt. Hon. A. R. W.
Price, Henry (Lewisham, W.)
Webbe, Sir H.


Lucas, Sir Jocelyn (Portsmouth, S.)
Prior-Palmer, Brig. O. L.
Whitelaw, W.S.I.(Penrith &amp; Border)


Lucas, P. B. (Brentford &amp; Chiswick)
Raikes. Sir Victor
Williams, Paul (Sunderland, S.)


Lucas-Tooth, Sir Hugh
Rawlinson, Peter
Williams, R. Dudley (Exeter)


McAdden, S. J.
Redmayne, M.
Wills, G. (Bridgwater)


Macdonald, Sir Peter
Rees-Davies, W. R.
Wilson, Geoffrey (Truro)


Mackeson, Brig. Sir Harry
Remnant, Hon. P.
Wood, Hon. R.


Mackie, J. H. (Galloway)
Renton, D. L. M.
Yates, William (The Wrekin)


McLaughlin, Mrs. P.
Ridsdale, J. E.



McLean, Neil (Inverness)
Rippon, A. G. F.
TELLERS FOR THE NOES:




Mr. Barber and Mr. Bryan.

Mr. Speaker: The next Amendment I propose to select is that in page 8, line 44, at the end to insert:
and the tenant of which was not then over pensionable age".

Mr. Mitchison: This and the next two Amendments on the Order Paper, in page 8, line 44, at the end to insert:
Provided that—

(a) where under this subsection a dwelling-house becomes decontrolled a statutory tenant who was in possession of such dwelling-house for a period of one year or more immediately prior to the seventh day of November, nineteen hundred and fifty-six, may serve upon the landlord a notice requiring the landlord to grant a tenant a lease of not less than three years at a rent to be agreed; and, failing agreement, either party may apply to the county court to determine a reasonable rent, hereinafter called the new rent; and

(b) upon such new rent being determined by agreement or otherwise the landlord shall grant a lease (which except as to rent shall be upon the pre-existing terms and conditions) to such tenant if required to do so by the tenant and in the event of his failing or refusing to grant such lease the landlord shall not be entitled to recover possession of the said dwelling-house until after the expiration of three years from the passing of this Act so long as the tenant pays the new rent and observes the other terms and conditions of the tenancy.
and in page 8, line 44, at the end to insert:
Provided that—

(a) where under this subsection a dwelling-house becomes decontrolled a statutory tenant who was in possession of such dwelling-house for a period of one year or more immediately prior to the seventh day, of November, nineteen hundred and fifty-six. may serve upon the landlord a notice requiring the landlord to grant to the tenant


a lease of not less than three years at a rent to be agreed; and, failing agreement either party may apply to the tribunal to determine a reasonable rent, hereinafter called the new rent; and
(b) upon such new rent being determined by agreement or otherwise the landlord shall grant a lease (which except as to rent shall be upon the pre-existing terms and conditions) to such tenant if required to do so by the tenant and in the event of his failing or refusing to grant such lease the landlord shall not be entitled to recover possession of the said dwelling-house until after the expiration of three years from the passing of this Act so long as the tenant pays the new rent and observes the other terms and conditions of the tenancy.
were not discussed in Committee because of the Guillotine and, having regard to the Guillotine and subsequent Amendments on the Order Paper, and only for that reason, we do not propose to move them.

Mr. Godfrey Lagden: I beg to move, in page 8, line 44, at the end to insert:
Provided that, for the purpose of this subsection, the Urban District of Hornchurch and the Borough of Romford shall be deemed to be included in the Metropolitan Police District.
The effect of this Amendment will be to bring into the scope of the Clause the Borough of Romford and the Urban District of Hornchurch and make them as the Metropolitan Police District. Those of us who are familiar with the Metropolitan Police District sometimes look upon it as merely the area of Central London and its immediate neighbourhood, but in point of fact the Metropolitan Police District stretches very far wide of Central London and the particular district which is covered by K Division takes in places such as Ilford, Barking, Dagenham and Chadwell Heath and goes right to the borders of the Borough of Ilford and the Urban District of Hornchurch.
The Borough of Ilford has some 85,000 people and the Urban District of Horn-church has 115,000 people. I hope that the Minister has made inquiries. Perhaps I may reasonably hope that he visited this area. If he has, I challenge him to say where the Metropolitan Police District starts and finishes. If this Amendment be not accepted the position will be that neighbours conversing with each other over their garden fences on a Sunday morning will find that one man can say, "I am a Londoner, and the

amount of the rate-able value which affects me is £40," while his next-door neighbour will be able to say, "For the purposes of this Bill I am a provincial, and for me the amount is £30." That is an obvious injustice which I do not think even the Minister can explain away.
I hope my right hon. Friend will not tell me that the matter is dealt with in this way because it is a neat and tidy way of doing it. I think he should pay more regard to the effect which it is likely to have on this tremendous number of people and a little less regard to the neat, tidy and convenient way which his Department would like to deal with the matter. I was very glad to hear the Minister say, "I am anxious to avoid injustice to honest persons." I am presenting him with an opportunity to be just to nearly 200,000 persons. This is a question of expediency versus justice, and I hope I may be confident that my right hon. Friend will come down on the side of justice at the expense of expediency.
If we contemplate some of the other divisions in the Metropolitan Police District, we find that nowhere does the same set of circumstances apply which applies in the K Division. Nowhere are there such tremendous numbers of the population which actually meet, street by street, and house by house, with populations in the Metropolitan Police District. For instance, if we take the S Division, we will find that just inside is Potters Bar and Radlett and just outside is Smug Oak. In the B Division West Moseley is just inside and Esher outside, with four divisions of country between the two.
If the Minister, when looking at this matter, is attracted by attractive names, he will find that in the P Division Farnborough is just inside while Pratts Bottom is just outside. I wish to do no injustice to Pratts Bottom, but I wish to do justice to Hornchurch and Romford. In case my right hon. Friend should think this only a small matter, I can assure him that the 200,000 people in those two very large areas will be saying tonight, or tomorrow morning, "I wonder whether the Minister was really sincere when he said, 'I am anxious to avoid injustice to honest persons.'" These are honest persons and they look to the Minister to do justice in this case and to accept the Amendment.

Lieut.-Colonel J. K. Cordeaux: I beg to second the Amendment.

Mr. Mitchison: I am reminded of one of my hon. Friends who represents a Scottish constituency and who, during the discussions on a Scottish poaching Bill, sought on every possible occasion to exclude the River Tweed. This is a magnificent constituency Amendment. I rise to put my nose into the affairs of these two places only because I find the motive for the Amendment extremely interesting. I have been sitting here throughout the day watching the splits in the Tory Party. They run in every possible direction. We have the Oldham mutineers and the Margate mutineers, and here we have a separate and highly individual effort on behalf of the constituency of the hon. Member for Horn-church (Mr. Lagden). What he is anxious to do is to remedy injustice, and what is so interesting about the matter is what he considers to be injustice. He considers it unjust that people living in the neighbourhood of London in houses which have rate-able values between £30 and £40, should find those houses decontrolled.
He considers that to be an injustice because he looks at the question from the point of view of his constituents. For the people living in his constituency decontrol is a wicked and unjust thing, and it is in order to remedy that injustice that he requires part or the whole of his constituency to be deemed to be part of the Metropolitan Police District.

Mr. Lagden: I should like to inform the hon. and learned Member—although I should have thought that he would have known this—that the Borough of Romford is not in my constituency; it is represented by one of his hon. Friends.

Mr. Mitchison: I quite agree, but what interests me is the hon. Member's advocacy on behalf of his own constituency, and his reasons for it. I find it very fascinating. It comes to this: the hon. Member considers it an injustice to his constituents that the Bill should deconrol those houses in his constituency with a rate-able value of more than £30. He wants to extend the decontrol limit to one of £40 rate-able value.
That was the whole burden of his speech. How an hon. Member who holds

those views of decontrol can possibly support this part of the Bill passes my understanding. For that matter, it passes my understanding how the hon. Member for Isle of Thanet (Mr. Rees-Davies) could really say that he was in favour of the Bill and then demonstrate with such particularity and eloquence the enormous amount of harm that would be done by it, by giving examples from one part of London and another.
The demoralisation on the benches opposite is growing to a degree which begins to interest us all. Is there a single right hon. or hon. Member opposite—except the Minister and the Parliamentary Secretary—who is really in favour of the Bill, or in favour of all of it? Or is it the case that hon. Members opposite are all in favour of some little bit, but would like exceptions made and, like the hon. Member for Horn-church, would like it to apply to the rest of England but not to Hornchurch, or the rest of England but not to the Isle of Thanet, or the rest of England but not to this or that other marginal constituency held by a Tory Member on the outskirts of London or anywhere else?
It is fascinating to watch the spread of this demoralisation; the splits growing and widening; the number of factions opposite getting larger and larger; the efficacy of the Government slowly fading away, and the Minister being pushed over first in one direction and then in another by his professed supporters. I hope that he will learn a lesson from this small and innocent Amendment and do the honest and thorough thing—withdraw the the Bill.

Sir Victor Raikes (Liverpool, Garston): In view of the taunt which has been made by the hon. and learned Member for Kettering (Mr. Mitchison) that this is merely a constituency matter, I as the Member for the Garston Division of Liverpool rise to support my hon. Friend the Member for Hornchurch (Mr. Lagden) on this Amendment.
I think I am entitled to give my reason why I support the Amendment. I know a little of the County of Essex. When one gets to the Romford and Hornchurch area one is just approaching the Green Belt. Supposing the area which my hon. Friend was referring to was the other side of the Green Belt, it might be said


that the whole of it should be considered outside the Metropolitan area, but that is not so. Probably the Minister has a map before him, but certainly the hon. and learned Member for Kettering had no map in front of him, as was plain from his speech.

Sir Robert Boothby: He would not have been able to read it.

Sir V. Raikes: He may have been able to read it as one can read anything, but I do not think he did. The Metropolitan area spreads out. Here we have an area on the border of the Green Belt, partly in and partly out of the Green Belt. If it were outside the Belt there would be no complaint at all, but looking at the map of Metropolitan London, I challenge my right hon. Friend to say that Rom-ford and Hornchurch are not an absolute mess, which in fact they are.

Mr. Lagden: Much as I appreciate the attempt of my hon. Friend to support me, I must disagree with him when he says that Hornchurch is a mess.

Sir V. Raikes: I apologise most deeply to my hon. Friend if I suggested that Hornchurch was a mess. It was until my hon. Friend was returned for the constituency. I must not say more, although I should like to. It is what we might call a territorial mess from the point of view of the Metropolitan area. Every Ministry hates making any change. It is not a question of tidiness. I disagree with my hon. Friend over tidiness. It is vilely untidy, but every civil servant hates to see his own tidiness tidied up when it becomes untidy. With the growth of population ande Green Belt it has become incredibly untidy. The tidy way of dealing with this matter would be to make the Green Belt the demarcation area. Then no one could complain.

Mr. Janner: Will the hon. Member give the House the benefit of his views as to why he wants this particular district to have a £40 limit, whereas his own constituency should have only a £30 limit? What is it all about? The Minister said that decontrol is a wonderful thing; does the hon. Member say it is not?

Sir V. Raikes: I am much too old to he caught out by that sort of thing. The

answer is very simple. If Romford and Hornchurch were the other side of the Green Belt, they should be treated as being outside the Metropolitan district. As they are inside the Green Belt, in my view they should be treated as being within the Metropolitan area, irrespective whether the limit is £30 or £40. The latter point does not affect me. I am talking in terms of tidiness. I am glad the hon. Member realises that I cannot be caught out with that sort of catch question.

Mr. H. Brooke: First of all, I suggest that the House should set aside all these arguments about the alleged tidiness of the civil servants and the alleged messiness of Hornchurch. Neither of those is a true bill, and I certainly wish to defend the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Hornchurch (Mr. Lagden) against any such dastardly allegations.
I assure him that Romford and Horn-church are not wholly unfamiliar to me. Of course, I have not his intimate knowledge of all the physical quarters of his constituency which he described, but I have some understanding of the map and the relation of his constituency and the Borough of Romford to the Metropolitan Police District and to the Green Belt. I understand and sympathise with his motives in moving the Amendment, although I am afraid that I must disappoint him by saying that I cannot advise the House to accept it.
The fact is that ever since the original Rent Act in 1915, there has always been a separate rate-able value limit for the Metropolitan Police District. That is not because civil servants wish to be tidy, but because Parliament in its wisdom has always felt certain that there should be definite and known demarcation lines with no uncertainty or dubiety about them, and the Metropolitan Police Area has always been taken for the purposes of the Rent Acts as it stood at the time when the legislation was introduced.
My hon. Friend is suggesting that we should deem the area to be extended to include one particular fringe area. I am saying nothing derogatory of his constituency, but I think that is the most accurate way in which I can describe the plea which he is making to me. He will correct me if I am wrong, but to the best of my knowledge the Metropolitan Police District boundary does not run through


his constituency or through the Borough of Romford but to the west of them. The plea which he is making to me and to the House is that the Green Belt would be a better boundary for Rent Acts purposes than the long-established boundary of the Metropolitan Police District.
The facts are that the greater part of Hornchurch and almost the whole of the Borough of Romford are within the Green Belt, and if one made the boundary for Rent Act purposes the inner edge of the Green Belt, one would have the situation in which most of his constituency and almost all the Borough of Romford were in the provincial area for Rent Act purposes whereas South Hornchurch and Rainham, and possibly some other small areas, would be within what is classed as the London district for Rent Act purposes. My hon. Friend does not want that. By his Amendment he wants the whole of the urban district of Hornchurch and the whole of the Borough of Romford to be brought within the area. I must ask myself, if I were to recommend Parliament to do that, what consequential action we should have to take. I am sure that he has given attention to this, too, because it is such an obvious point.
10.15 p.m.
Clearly, we must look all round London to see if there are other areas where a similar case could be made. I have tried to do that, and, undoubtedly, there are places like Watford and Dartford—and, I have no doubt, others—where a similar case could be made. I give my hon. Friend the greatest credit for having been the hon. Member who has brought to the attention of the House the particular case for his own constituency, but if he were to rest his case on the Green Belt argument, I think that he would be creating more difficulties than he would solve, because we would have a new dividing line which would, in fact, cut through both these local authority areas.
I am sure I carry the whole House with me when I say that whole districts have to be taken for the purpose of certainty. Therefore, one cannot take the Green Belt dividing line. One must either stick to the Metropolitan Police District area, with all the criticisms that may be brought against that, or one must

extend it—as it were, bulge it out in this direction or in that—in order to include a further built-up area which has developed on the fringe, just outside the district. The Metropolitan Police District area, having stood for these forty-two years as the dividing line, and having got that very important degree of certainty, I could not advise the House to make an alteration in it tonight.
I know that, whatever boundary one takes, one will have anomalies. One is so familiar with it in the county boundaries. My own constituency is on the edge of the County of London. One walks along the road and finds oneself, unknowingly, having walked into the County of Middlesex. That may make no difference so far as the Rent Acts are concerned, but there may be anomalies in other spheres. I fear we cannot make this land of ours so tidy that one can draw with absolute certainty demarcation lines that will avoid all anomalies. In my view, were we to depart from the Metropolitan Police District boundary we should do more harm than good.

Mr. Janner: Before the Minister sits down, would he take the opportunity of explaining to his hon. Friends that, after all, it does not really matter? I think that the Minister will be able to explain that it is much better that the district should have decontrol at a rateable value of £30 instead of £40, because the Rent Acts are an iniquitous system of rent control. Perhaps the Minister will explain that his hon. Friend ought not to press the matter, because it is much better for his district that the control should be at the rate of £30 and not £40.

Mr. Brooke: I am asking my hon. Friend not to press his Amendment, and I hold to what I said before, that, over the years, the Rent Acts have proved an iniquitous system of rent control. But what I am arguing is that it is desirable that there should be certainty in these matters.
I am arguing that it is impossible to avoid all anomalies, and I am suggesting to my hon. Friend, with great respect—and with all honour to him for the way in which he has put up a constituency point—that we should, as a Parliament, be doing more harm than good if, at this stage, we were to seek to adjust the demarcation line for Rent Act purposes.
I am well aware that my hon. Friend is arguing that his constituency and the Borough of Romford are parts of the built-up area of London rather than parts of the rural County of Essex. That may well be so. Nevertheless, I must ask the House to lay down a definite line, and I do not think that we shall get a more definite line than the Metropolitan Police District boundary.

Mr. Lagden: Having listened to my right hon. Friend the Minister, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the Amendment.

Hon. Members: No.

Amendment negatived.

Mr. Mitchison: I beg to move, in line 10, at the end to insert:
 or where an exchange tenancy is created and registered in accordance with the Schedule (Exchange Tenancies) to this Act.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: I think it would be convenient to discuss with this Amendment the new Schedule concerning exchange of tenancies.

Mr. Mitchison: Would it also be convenient if we could discuss the next following Amendment in line 10, at the end to insert:
 or where an exchange tenancy is created and registered in accordance with the Schedule (Exchange of Tenancies) to this Act.
and the Schedule appertaining thereto? They are very closely related.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: Yes, I think that would be for the convenience of the House.

Mr. Mitchison: It is really rather remarkable that Amendments about exchanges of tenancies should not have been introduced into the Bill at a far earlier stage by the right hon. Gentleman himself. I have listened very carefully to the case which has, from time to time, been made for the Bill from the benches opposite, not only by the right hon. Gentleman but by his supporters. It has really been based, as far as I can understand, on two points only, the first being that landlords are entitled as of right, by Act of Parliament, to a certain return on their property if kept intact or maintained. I say nothing about that at the moment, because this Amendment is not concerned with it. I would only make it quite clear that it seems to us on this side the most complete nonsense, and

philosophically, politically and morally entirely wrong.
There is another matter which has some validity in it. It is pointed out that the census of 1951 showed a considerable degree of under-occupation in the country. It is further pointed out that there is ground for supposing that some, at any rate, of that is still there. One is faced, therefore, with a situation where there are, on the one hand, houses which are under-occupied and, on the other hand, houses which are over-occupied, often being overcrowded. When this was put forward on Second Reading as a reason in favour of the Bill, I took the opportunity of saying at once, in reply to the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, the Parliamentary Secretary as he then was, that the right remedy for that situation is exchanges, and I went a little into the history of it.
The right hon. Gentleman is particularly qualified to consider this matter, for he was the Chairman of the Central Housing Advisory Committee when it reported on transfers, exchanges and rents. That Committee pointed out, quite rightly, that a very great deal can be done to help the housing situation by transfers and, even more, by exchanges. In the course of the passage of what is now the Housing Repairs and Rents Act, 1954, there was from our side an Amendment moved to facilitate exchanges and empower local authorities to take action, into which I need not go now. When I refer to the OFFICIAL REPORT of the proceedings of the Committee, I find that the right hon. Gentleman himself, on 16th March, 1954, rose to speak and began by saying:
Having spent a considerable part of the last 18 months in studying related questions to this, I can claim to be as keen as any Member of the Committee on facilitating exchanges, because I am one of those who believe that a very large contribution can be made by extending the system of exchanges towards securing fuller use of the housing accommodation that we have."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, Standing Committee C, , 16th March, 1954; c. 988–9.]
That has been substantially the only point that I could appreciate urged in favour of the present Bill by the right hon. Gentleman and his hon. Friends. The right hon. Gentleman then took exception to the method in the particular Amendment, but we are not concerned with that today.
That being the position, let us take it just one stage further. The next result was that the Amendment was refused by the right hon. Gentleman who is now Prime Minister. The next stage was that the present Prime Minister attempted by a circular to impose transfers and exchanges rather more on local authorities. I take no objection whatever to that. The difficulty about the matter was that while he suggested that to local authorities, much of what was proposed depended upon consultation and agreement with private landlords. That consultation and agreement seem to have been quite ineffective, for nothing whatever has been heard of the matter—at least, nothing has been published—since Circular No. 68 of 1954 followed on the Amendment moved by us in Committee.
Then I come to the right hon. Gentleman's party political broadcast on 14th of this month, in which, again to cut the matter quite short, the case he made for the Bill, apart from the landlord's supposed right to have a certain return on his investment, depended so far as I could see solely on the question of under-occupation and the desirability of exchanges.
The next question is, if so much depends on exchanges, what is to be the effect of the Bill, and particularly of the subsection which we are discussing, on exchanges? The subsection provides that if a new tenancy is created, there is to be decontrol. The Rent Acts are not to apply and the obvious consequence will be that in most cases, given the present housing situation, the landlord will ask for a very much higher rent. That is perfectly obvious. It must have been obvious to the right hon. Gentleman all along and yet it has been left to us, at the very last moment, to introduce proposals to meet that difficulty.
I want to emphasise once more the effect of the Bill as it stands on the object which the right hon. Gentleman himself seeks to attain and which he puts forward, quite illogically, as one at least of the main grounds for the Bill. It is perfectly clear that if there is to be decontrol on a new tenancy, the tenant who is in the house will not agree to it except for some very special reason, for it is obvious that he would have to pay a higher rent.
Let us take the most obvious case of a desirable exchange. Take the old people, whom on Second Reading, with the support of at least some hon. Members opposite, I took as a typical instance —the old couple who, having brought up a large family, have been left in a house which, as matters now are, is too large for them, where they have, in short, more rooms than they need. Take that old couple, on the one side, and, on the other side, younger people who are rearing a family and without sufficient room for their young folk. We ask the old folk to move out of the house, and the first consequence is——

It being half-past Ten o'clock, further consideration of the Bill, as amended, stood adjourned.

Bill, as amended (in the Standing Committee), to be further considered Tomorrow.

EMPIRE TOBACCO (IMPORTS)

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. R. Thompson.]

10.31 p.m.

Mr. J. Langford-Holt: I wish to raise with the Minister of State, Board of Trade, and to bring to the notice of the House a matter which has from time to time excited the interest of hon. Members on both sides of the Chamber. It is the question whether it is desirable, in the first place, and possible, in the second place, to increase the percentage of the non-dollar and Commonwealth tobacco in the import quotas of tobacco imported into this country. That is probably something we should like to do if it is at all possible. Moreover—and this will certainly commend itself to my right hon. and learned Friend—it is a proposition which will not cost the Treasury anything, but rather the reverse —it may well save the Treasury a little money and so help the Treasury in certain difficulties.
Can we, in the first place, and should we, in the second place, use more non-dollar tobacco at the expense of dollar tobacco imported into this country? Were we maintaining in our smokes the percentage of dollar tobacco that we were maintaining in 1938 it would, I am told, be costing us an additional 50 million


dollars a year. I have made some calculations, and they may be wrong, but if these figures be true, as I am assured by tobacco companies they are, then were we to maintain the same percentage of dollar tobacco in our smokes as we did in 1947 it would cost us about 150 million dollars to do so.
The last Parliamentary word on this question, as far as I can trace, was said on 12th February, when I asked whether my right hon. and learned Friend would consult the manufacturers to see whether it was possible for them to use more Empire tobacco, and my right hon. and learned Friend, who is to reply to the debate tonight, said:
Officials have discussed with manufacturers the possibility of using more sterling area tobacco. I understand that the manufacturers' fear is not so much directed to the impact on individual concerns as that their total sales would fall. We are. of course, considering this question in the general context of the public interest."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 12th February, 1957; Vol. 564, c. 1074.]
I am fascinated by that last sentence.
There are in this business three parties, the Government, the growers and the tobacco manufacturers in this country. All these three parties have not necessarily conflicting interests. In many important respects their interests are the same.
Let us consider, first, the manufacturers' arguments and their fears. The manufacturers state that they have taken and will continue to take as much first grade Empire tobacco as they can get—with one proviso. It is an important proviso, and it is this. It is the manufacturers' view that the point will be reached —I do not know that they are prepared to say exactly where—at which what they call the essential character of the cigarette or tobacco, the Virginia character—the sweet Virginia character, I am told it is—will be changed, and that then the whole smoking habits of the British people will be changed. I shall say a little more about that, which one may call the critical point, later.
What are the arguments of the tobacco growers? They, of course, use, as it is quite logical they should because it suits their purpose as well as the Treasury's purpose, the argument of the dollar saving which I have already mentioned.
They also use the argument which would naturally appeal to each one of us in this House—what one might call

the Imperial argument—that such increases in the Imperial rate are to the advantage of the Commonwealth and Empire, from the point of view both of this country and of the Empire country concerned. But they also have serious fears about the intentions of the United Kingdom. For example, on 7th February the President of the Board of Trade said:
I am ready to look at this matter, but, as I understand it, the facts are as stated by my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury (Mr. Langford-Holt)—that a change in the proportion of American tobacco might have very serious effects upon the cigarette industry."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 7th February, 1957; Vol. 564, c. 590.]
Phrases like that, even if not calculated to do so, certainly have the effect of raising some fears and doubts in the minds of the growers and create an air of contentment in this country as to the present tobacco situation.
It is further said that, although it is factually correct, it is quite wrong of my right hon. Friend the President of the Board of Trade to state that pretty well all the good quality tobacco from Rhodesia is now bought. It is factually correct, but the implication is incorrect because what has happened is that in Rhodesia steps are being taken to reduce the crop of tobacco rather than to increase it as we all wish to see.
Lord Malvern made a suggestion to my right hon. Friend the present Chancellor of the Exchequer when he was at the Board of Trade, namely, that the ratio of 61 per cent. dollar tobacco as against 39 per cent. Imperial tobacco should be changed. Had my right hon. Friend been able to accede to that request, I think we could have made a great step forward.
It is for my right hon. and learned Friend the Minister of State, Board of Trade, to state the Government's view, which, as I understand it, roughly speaking, is that, all things being equal, they would like to see a greater percentage of non-dollar tobacco used in this country provided that they themselves are not asked to interfere too much in the matter. Secondly, they would say that they are precluded from taking a straightforward tariff discrimination by the operation of G.A.T.T. Thirdly, they would say that, as tobacco is brought into this country on private


account, it is not in the first instance a matter for Her Majesty's Government.
What of the interests, as opposed to the arguments, of the manufacturers with regard to dollar tobacco? First, they are not responsible for our dollar reserves, and one must accept that. It is no part of their responsibility to husband dollar resources in this country. It is their job to produce the best type of cigarette or tobacco, and the type which more and more people will buy. They want to get that tobacco at the lowest possible cost. I think that the tobacco companies have behaved perfectly properly in this matter, and it is not for them to initiate any action.
I should like to make some suggestions to my hon. and learned Friend. In this question of tobacco one has to use the average of cigarettes, pipe tobacco and cigar tobacco generally. Since 1947, the percentage of dollar tobacco used in this country has gone down from 87½ per cent. to 60½ per cent. That was a direct result of an arrangement whereby, I think in the time of the Labour Government, a maximum of 61 per cent. of dollar tobacco should be used in this country. It is worth noting in that context that that percentage has been adhered to consistently ever since it was imposed. It is to be noted, therefore, that the percentage of American tobacco was 61 per cent. in 1953 and 60½ per cent. in 1956, and that the current rate is 60½ per cent. My hon. and learned Friend may have different figures, but those are the best figures that I can obtain.
They indicate to me that the 61 per cent. is at the moment the limit that the Government have set up and one beyond which the tobacco companies are not prepared to go unless some other form of action is taken or an inducement is brought to bear upon them. They are quite obviously not prepared to go it alone as individual companies when there is a risk that their competitors might not do the same. It is said, though I do not believe it is true, that the Government have an unhealthy interest in maintaining high sales of tobacco at whatever cost. One gets a morbid vision of rows of Scrooges sitting on the Front Bench and raking in the shekels, whatever the result. They have this interest, it is said, because

of the immense effect of tobacco sales on the Revenue.
I have mentioned the critical point which the tobacco manufacturers fear. They fear that at some point, which they are not able to specify, the whole of the great British public will cease smoking tobacco because the essential character of the cigarette has changed. I do not think that will happen with a public which has been undeterred by the sudden imposition of the taxation which the right hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Mr. Dalton) put on when he said that he was imposing an extra 1s. to bring down the amount of cigarette smoking in the country. The public has seen that the Commonwealth tobacco content has been increased, and that the dollar tobacco content has been reduced from 80 per cent. to 60 per cent. The British Medical Association has told people that if they smoke cigarettes they will kill themselves with lung cancer and still, year after year. they smoke more. I cannot believe, therefore, that at the point when a little more Rhodesian tobacco is put into cigarettes the great British public will throw them away and give up the smoking habit altogether.
I should like the Government to consult with the trade to see whether it is not possible, bearing in mind the difficulties of cultivation and storage in Rhodesia where the industry is still growing, to increase the quantity of Commonwealth tobacco, by agreement with the manufacturers in this country, by 1½ per cent. or 2 per cent. at varying periods. Those are amounts which I am sure nobody would notice. There is, however, the valid argument that the quality of Rhodesian tobacco has fallen. Therefore, as a second suggestion, the Government might be asked, in order to induce the Rhodesian or Commonwealth growers to grow a better quality, to encourage a higher percentage of better quality tobacco at the expense of a lower percentage of poorer quality. Good Rhodesian tobacco at its best is second to none in the world, and bad Rhodesian tobacco can be really bad.
Like many others, I hope, I myself smoke Empire tobacco. One gets a certain amount of smug satisfaction, within certain limits, that one is doing the right sort of thing. I should like my right hon. and learned Friend to say that he will look at the whole question again, that


there is no sense of contentment on the part of the Government, and that he will try to help in this matter which has such an immense psychological and sentimental appeal not only to us in this House, but to the vast majority of people in the country.

10.45 p.m.

The Minister of State, Board of Trade (Mr. Derek Walker-Smith): My hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury (Mr. Langford-Holt) has correctly said that this is a subject which has excited a good deal of Parliamentary attention in recent months. In fact, there was an Adjournment debate on this subject shortly before Christmas, and between that debate and this a large number of Parliamentary Questions have been asked, some of them by my hon. Friend himself. But it would be quite wrong to draw from that the inference that this is in any way a deteriorating situation. In fact, if the situation is seen in perspective, I believe the reverse to be true.
My hon. Friend quoted early in his argument the 1938 figures of Commonwealth tobacco. In 1938, the Commonwealth percentage of all types of tobacco —I am using here the figures of clearances from bond for home consumption—was 24. By 1945 it was down to 20½ per cent., but by 1952 it had gone up to 45 per cent., and in 1956 it was no less than 48 per cent. That 48 per cent. was Commonwealth tobacco.
My hon. Friend rather tended to use the terms "Commonwealth tobacco" and "non-dollar tobacco" as if they were interchangeable. That is, of course, a misapprehension which is rather common in this controversy. It is not in any sense a straight issue between United States tobacco and Rhodesian tobacco. Commonwealth tobacco consists, for this purpose, of Rhodesian, Indian and Canadian tobacco, and Canada is part of the dollar area.
The trend of the dollar percentage compared with the Rhodesian percentage shows that in 1938 the dollar percentage was 87½, as I think my hon. Friend said, and the Rhodesian was only 7½. By 1956, the dollar percentage was 60½ and the Rhodesian percentage had gone right up to 22. I submit that, in perspective, this is a situation which is moving in the way which I understand my hon. Friend would want.
This advance has proceeded with the aid of two agreements or arrangements. My hon. Friend said that the Government had set the limit of 61 per cent. There is a voluntary arrangement with the United Kingdom manufacturers whereby they restrict their usings of light flue-cured tobacco from dollar sources for home trade cigarettes to 61 per cent. Again, that 61 per cent. contains two elements—50 per cent. United States and 11 per cent. Canadian tobacco.
The second agreement is the so-called London Agreement between the United Kingdom manufacturers and the Rhodesian growers which specifies the quantities that the manufacturers are prepared to buy subject to availability, quality and price. Those quantities have increased year by year. Again, comparing the pre-war position with the present, pre-war the Southern Rhodesian crop was only 30 million lb.; by 1956 it showed a record production of no fewer than 165 million lb. If we take the test of the United Kingdom purchases, we get the same gratifying trend, from 20 million lb. before the war to 84 million lb. in 1956, plus a further 4 million lb. from Northern Rhodesia.
Indeed, the Commonwealth enjoys considerable advantages arising out of the trade and tariff structure. In the first place, dollar supplies of tobacco are the only ones which are restricted. Imports from non-dollar Commonwealth countries are on open general licence and non-dollar countries outside the Commonwealth have their imports of tobacco freely licensed. So the non-dollar Commonwealth, in which I understand my hon. Friend to be primarily interested, enjoys the advantages of both an open market and of Imperial Preference at 1s. 6½d. per 1b.
My hon. Friend referred to G.A.T.T. Of course, it is not possible to increase the Preference margin for the reasons that he knows. Article I of G.A.T.T, forbids the extension of the Preference margin in this context, because the present duty was fixed in 1943, that is to say, four years before the base date year 1947, when the G.A.T.T. was signed.
I want now to refer to the Rhodesian crop to which my hon. Friend devoted part of his argument. I assure him that at present all the good quality leaf and,


indeed, a good deal of poor quality leaf is still being bought by the United Kingdom and other sterling area countries, particularly Australia. As my hon. Friend is primarily concerned with the Commonwealth, I would put it to him that there would be no point in expanding our purchases of Rhodesian tobacco if the effect was merely to push Australia pro tanto into the dollar market because Australia is also part of the Commonwealth, is part of the sterling area and has its own balance of payments difficulties.
My hon. Friend asked about Government policy. Our policy is, as I think he apprehended, that we want to see Rhodesia and other Commonwealth sources further expand the export of good tobacco so that our manufacturers may increase their purchases. As he will know, there are really two basic factors in this and he referred to both. The first is the availability of good quality non-dollar leaf at reasonable prices and the second is consumer taste.
On the first of those two matters, my hon. Friend referred to what he called the reduction of the Rhodesian crop. If I may briefly indicate the facts with regard to that, they are that the rapid expansion of the tobacco acreage in Rhodesia has temporarily outstripped the facilities for supervising and curing the crop. In consequence of that, the percentage of sub-standard leaf has so increased that the United Kingdom has bought a considerable amount of inferior tobacco in recent years. The whole of the increased yield which made 1956 a record crop year was in the so-called "nondescript" grades, that is to say, a type not suitable for our market.
It is in those circumstances that the Rhodesian Tobacco Association has called for a reduction in the acreage planted. Naturally, we hope that these steps which it has taken to check over-planting and to improve the standards will succeed, and that good Rhodesian tobacco will become more nearly competitive in price with the North American.
The second matter which influences this question is the matter of consumer taste to which my hon. Friend referred. I am told that it is a fact that a marked increase in the proportion of Rhodesian tobacco would affect the flavour to

smokers. Of course, it is true that we cannot precisely say at what point that would affect consumption. But at least we have this to guide us, that the market in the United Kingdom for all-Rhodesian cigarettes has practically vanished.
That being so, I think my hon. Friend, and those who think with him on this issue, must concede that there is clearly a case at any rate for some caution in the context of those facts, and especially in the light of the Revenue aspect, because, although my hon. Friend had some hard words to say about the Treasury in this matter—and I was at the Treasury when it first became my duty to study this subject—I think he would readily concede that the Revenue aspect is highly relevant in the context of tobacco.
I hope that I have been able to put the matter fairly and objectively in regard to this question of the sources of our tobacco. It is a customary courtesy to say that a service has been done in raising these matters. I should certainly say that in regard to my hon. Friend's initiative, and especially so if, as a result of it, those interested in the matter will be good enough to study the clear and simple facts as I have sought to explain them and reflect upon them. I am sure that they will come to the conclusion that we need not take the rather pessimistic view which my hon. Friend has taken.

10.57 p.m.

Mr. W. A. Wilkins: I listened with interest and satisfaction to the reply given by the Minister of State to the hon. Member for Shrewsbury (Mr. Langford-Holt). I have considerable interest in the subject because I have in my constituency what I believe to be the largest of all the tobacco manufacturing factories in the country, and I have therefore taken opportunities to discuss these matters with the directors of that company. In the first place, I want to make it clear that this is not a matter which concerns only the Imperial Tobacco Company; it concerns all the tobacco manufacturers in the country.
I think I am entitled to say, from the conversations which I have had with them, that the last thing in the world they want to do is to curtail their purchases of Rhodesian tobacco. The evidence of that is to be found in the amount of capital investment which they put into


that country, and I believe they are prepared to extend the welfare services which they have already sponsored there. But we must recognise that they have some sense of pride in the manufacture of their goods. After all, we say that it is the quality of our goods which is the hallmark on which we depend for selling them abroad, and that applies no less to the manufacturers of tobacco than to any other industry. That is their major concern.
The Minister of State rightly stressed the most important fact in the whole of the debate, that there was a tendency to overgrow, if I may use that expression, and to outstrip their ability in Rhodesia to produce a first-class article. It is a fact that particularly Australia, but also many other countries, are prepared to buy the best grade of Rhodesian tobacco while wishing to leave behind the seconds and thirds which it is most difficult to sell except in certain countries where they are prepared to smoke almost anything. It seems to me to be primarily a matter of techniques of growing and especially of curing. We must be honest about this and recognise when we are talking about

Virginia tobacco that we are talking about tobacco produced in a country which has been growing it for many years and where the technique has been developed to a fine art. That has to be learned in Rhodesia.
I believe that the tobacco manufacturers here feel that the Government could help them in the expansion of the Rhodesian tobacco industry in certain directions, possibly in making technical advice available and in other forms of the application of technical machinery. May I therefore suggest to the Minister of State that it might be well if his Department got in touch with the tobacco manufacturers, if it is not already doing so—as I expect it is—to see in what way the Government and the manufacturers can work together to improve the quality of the tobacco which is being produced in Rhodesia?

The Question having been proposed after Ten o'clock and the Debate having continued for half an hour, Mr. SPEAKER adjourned the House without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.

Adjourned accordingly at Eleven o'clock.